Firmus Valuation Hits $10.5B: The Ex-Bitcoin Miner's $2B Raise for AI Factories

Firmus raised $2 billion at a $10.5 billion valuation on August 7, 2026 — a company that was mining Bitcoin six years ago now building Nvidia-powered AI data centers across Australia.

This is one of the largest AI infrastructure raises of the summer, and it went to a company almost nobody outside Australia had heard of eighteen months ago. Firmus started as a Bitcoin mining operator, pivoted into what it calls "AI factories," and has now roughly quintupled its valuation in eleven months on the back of a single relationship with Nvidia and a national buildout called Project Southgate. The round says as much about how much capital is chasing AI power infrastructure right now as it does about Firmus specifically.

Firmus Valuation: The $2 Billion Raise That Hit $10.5 Billion

Firmus closed a $2 billion strategic equity round on August 7, 2026, pushing its post-money valuation above $10.5 billion. That is nearly double the $5.5 billion mark it held just four months earlier, in April 2026, and roughly 5.7 times the $1.85 billion valuation it carried in September 2025 — a compounding curve most AI labs would envy, achieved by a company that spent most of its early life running mining rigs, not GPUs for inference.

From Bitcoin Rigs to Nvidia's "AI Factories"

Firmus was founded in 2019 by Oliver Curtis, Tim Rosenfield, and Jonathan Levee as a Bitcoin mining company, building expertise in cheap power sourcing and rapid site development rather than chip design or model training. That background became the pitch for its pivot: the hard part of building an AI data center isn't the GPUs, it's the power, the cooling, and the permitting — exactly what a mining operator already knows how to move fast on. Firmus rebranded its facilities as "green AI factories," emphasizing energy-efficient, renewable-powered compute rather than the diesel-backup approach some US data center developers have leaned on.

The vehicle for that pivot is Project Southgate, a joint buildout with Nvidia and CDC Data Centres that started in Tasmania and is now expanding into Melbourne, Sydney, Canberra, Perth, and — as of this round — Indonesia. The flagship Melbourne site alone is slated to house roughly 18,400 Nvidia GB300 GPUs, and the program overall is targeting about 1.6 gigawatts of AI compute capacity across five-plus sites by 2028.

Firmus's Valuation Climb: Three Rounds, Eleven Months

The pace is the story here. Firmus went from a AU$330 million raise at a AU$1.85 billion valuation in September 2025, to a $505 million round that TechCrunch reported hit a $5.5 billion valuation in April 2026, to $2 billion at $10.5 billion in August 2026 — a jump Forbes covered the same week it closed. Three rounds, eleven months, roughly 5.7x the valuation.

Who's Backing the Round

The Buildout: 1.6 Gigawatts by 2028

Project Southgate's targeted capacity ramp is aggressive even by AI-infrastructure standards. The program started with a single Tasmania site in late 2025 and is now scoped to reach roughly 1.6 gigawatts across five-plus sites by 2028 — enough to power a mid-sized city, entirely dedicated to Nvidia GPU compute.

How Firmus Compares to the Other AI Infrastructure Money

Firmus isn't the only company raising billion-dollar rounds to build the physical layer under AI. Here's how its valuation and pace stack up against the other well-funded "neocloud" and AI data center builders as of mid-August 2026.

Valuations and dates from company disclosures, Bloomberg, TechCrunch, and stockanalysis.com; public-company figures are market cap as of August 19, 2026 and move daily.

What the Headline Misses

The $10.5 billion equity number doesn't tell you about the other side of Firmus's balance sheet. In February 2026, Blackstone and Coatue also led a separate $10 billion debt financing facility for Project Southgate — one of the largest private debt packages in Australian history. Stacking a $10 billion debt facility on top of a company that only reached unicorn status eleven months ago is a meaningfully different risk profile than an all-equity balance sheet, even with the same backers on both sides of the capital structure.

This likely means Firmus's actual leverage — debt plus equity commitments against a company with no public financials — is harder to assess than the $10.5 billion headline suggests. A 1.6 gigawatt buildout target by 2028 is also a company target, not contracted, pre-leased capacity; Crusoe's comparable disclosures cite gigawatts under signed contract with named hyperscaler customers, a distinction Firmus hasn't made public in the same detail.

There's also a competitive question the round doesn't resolve: Australia's own hyperscalers — AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud all have active or announced local data center expansions — could out-build a well-funded but young independent operator on raw capital availability alone. Firmus's bet is that its Nvidia relationship and sovereign, renewable-powered positioning wins deals the hyperscalers either can't or won't chase at the same pace.

Bull Case vs. Bear Case

My Take

What stands out to me isn't that a Bitcoin miner pivoted into AI infrastructure — that trade has been available to anyone who already owned power contracts and site-development permits since 2023. It's the speed and the capital structure. Going from $1.85 billion to $10.5 billion in eleven months, with Blackstone anchoring both the equity round and a separate $10 billion debt facility, is the kind of financing usually reserved for companies with years of contracted revenue behind them, not a five-year-old company still mid-pivot.

The Jane Street detail is the one worth watching: public-markets-adjacent capital showing up on a private infrastructure deal like this tends to mean the company is being positioned for a near-term listing, not another private round. A $2 billion ASX IPO target lines up with that read.

The real test is whether Firmus can convert its stated 1.6 gigawatt target into signed, contracted capacity with named tenants the way Crusoe has with Meta and Oracle. If it does, $10.5 billion will look conservative next to Crusoe's reported $30 billion talks. If the buildout slips or hyperscalers out-compete on price, the debt load is what turns a growth story into a balance-sheet problem.

The Bottom Line on Firmus's $2 Billion Raise

Firmus raised $2 billion at a $10.5 billion valuation on August 7, 2026, led by returning backers Nvidia and Coatue plus new capital from Blackstone and Jane Street — nearly doubling its worth in four months and roughly 5.7x-ing it in eleven. The company is racing to turn its Bitcoin-mining-era power and site-development expertise into 1.6 gigawatts of Nvidia-powered AI compute across Australia and Indonesia by 2028, backed by both this equity round and a separate $10 billion debt facility.

Track this and other AI infrastructure funding rounds on our AI Valuations tracker and 2026 VC fundraises page.