Australian AI infrastructure company Firmus has raised $2 billion in a strategic equity round that nearly doubles its valuation to more than $10.5 billion, according to reports from Seeking Alpha and marketscreener.com.
Seeking Alpha reports the round was led by Coatue, with participation from Nvidia, Blackstone and Jane Street. The money is earmarked for expanding AI infrastructure in Australia and across the Asia-Pacific region.
The detail worth pausing on is Nvidia's role. Nvidia sells the chips that AI data centers are built around, and here it is also writing checks to the companies buying and deploying them. That pattern — a supplier taking equity stakes in its own customers' buildouts — has become a defining feature of the current AI capital cycle, and it means Nvidia's fortunes and its customers' fortunes are increasingly braided together.
The fundraise lands in a market where investors are scrutinizing how AI expansion gets paid for. On the same news cycle, TechStock² reports that shares of Celestica Inc. (NYSE:CLS) fell to their $310 issue price amid a $3 billion AI equity raise, putting the company's 2027 expansion plans under fresh scrutiny. Firmus, as a private company, raised at a sharply higher valuation; Celestica, publicly traded, saw its stock pulled down to the price of the new shares it issued.
That contrast captures the moment. Private AI infrastructure players are still commanding rapidly rising valuations from deep-pocketed strategic backers, while public-market investors are asking harder questions about dilution and whether spending plans years out will actually pay off.
It matters because the physical buildout of AI — the data centers, power and hardware behind every chatbot and model — is now being financed at a scale where who funds it, and on what terms, shapes which companies get to compete.