Firmus, a Sydney-based company that builds data centers for artificial intelligence, has raised $2 billion in equity funding — and in doing so nearly doubled its valuation in four months.
According to a Reuters report by Nichiket Sunil, aggregated by Techmeme, Firmus announced the raise on Friday and said the money will speed up the build-out of its AI infrastructure. The round came from investors including Coatue and chipmaker Nvidia, and values the company at $10.5 billion post-money, up from $5.5 billion in April.
Business News Australia framed the deal in Australian dollars, reporting that Firmus secured A$3.1 billion from Blackstone, Coatue and Nvidia to "supercharge" its AI factory rollout. The Economic Times noted the same headline figure — $2 billion in equity this week, lifting the valuation past $10.5 billion, with proceeds going toward accelerating AI factory build-outs. A summary from NewsBytes added that the expansion is aimed at the Asia-Pacific region.
The cast of backers is telling. Nvidia, which makes the chips that AI data centers are built around, is investing in a customer that will buy them. Blackstone and Coatue bring the kind of large-scale capital that physical infrastructure — buildings, power, cooling — demands. "AI factory" is industry shorthand for a facility purpose-built to train and run AI models, rather than a general-purpose data center.
The sources differ on how to headline the number: Reuters and others lead with $2 billion in equity, while Business News Australia cites $3.1 billion. That gap likely reflects currency or debt-versus-equity differences, though none of the reports spell out the reconciliation.
Why it matters: the compute needed to run AI is being built out fast and far from Silicon Valley, and a valuation that doubles in four months shows how much investors are betting that demand for it keeps climbing.