Analysis
Firmus, the Australian AI infrastructure company that started as a Bitcoin miner, closed a fully subscribed $2 billion strategic equity round, according to Bloomberg. The round includes follow-on capital from existing backers Coatue and Nvidia, alongside new investment from funds managed by Blackstone Tactical Opportunities and other Blackstone vehicles, plus participation from trading and technology firm Jane Street. The raise pushes Firmus's post-money valuation above $10.5 billion, nearly double the $5.5 billion mark it carried after an April funding round, and brings total new equity raised over the past twelve months past $3 billion.
The capital is earmarked for Firmus's Project Southgate AI factory buildout across Australia, built on Nvidia's DSX AI Factory Reference Architecture, along with early steps toward expansion into other Asia-Pacific markets including Indonesia. Firmus has also built domestic Australian manufacturing capability for its proprietary HyperCube compute platform and grid-aware software designed to manage power draw against local grid constraints -- a capability that matters more in Australia's comparatively thin grid infrastructure than it would in a market with deeper transmission capacity.
“## From stranded crypto power to AI factories Firmus's origin as a Bitcoin miner is not incidental to its current pitch.”
From stranded crypto power to AI factories
Firmus's origin as a Bitcoin miner is not incidental to its current pitch. Crypto miners spent the last decade acquiring power purchase agreements, grid interconnects and industrial sites in regions with cheap electricity -- exactly the assets an AI data center operator needs, and exactly the assets that took years to permit and build. Firmus is one of a growing list of former mining operators, alongside names like Core Scientific and Cipher Mining in the U.S., that have converted that stranded infrastructure into an AI compute pivot rather than starting from zero.
Nvidia's continued participation as both an investor and reference-architecture partner mirrors the pattern showing up across its balance sheet this year: back the operator, supply the chips, and collect twice -- once on equity upside, once on hardware margin. That structure has drawn scrutiny domestically as Nvidia's OpenAI and SpaceX-adjacent commitments have grown, and Firmus is a smaller-scale but structurally identical version of the same playbook applied to the Asia-Pacific buildout, where power availability and land cost currently look more favorable than in constrained U.S. markets like Virginia.
