AI infrastructure company Firmus Technologies has raised A$330 million (US$220.1 million) through an equity placement, with Ellerston Capital as cornerstone investor and participation from NVIDIA. The offer was materially upsized and drew demand from Australian institutional and high-net-worth investors.

Morgans acted as sole lead manager for the placement, while Highbury Partnership served as financial adviser to Firmus. The raise was completed at a post-money valuation of A$1.85 billion (US$1.2 billion).

The company will use the funds to accelerate Project Southgate, its flagship development with the Tasmanian Government. 

The project is located in the newly announced Green AI Factory Zone in northern Tasmania and is intended to establish Australia’s first sovereign, renewable-powered AI factory campus. The facility is planned to deploy 36,000 NVIDIA GPUs in two stages and is designed for compute density, energy efficiency and workload flexibility.

Firmus co-CEO Tim Rosenfield said the company’s mission is to build highly efficient AI infrastructure, with the Firmus AI Factory designed to minimise cost, energy, water and space usage. The goal is to give Australians greater agency over how AI is integrated into the country’s future.

Co-CEO Oliver Curtis says Project Southgate marks the start of an AI factory era in Australia, focused on developing sovereign capability, creating new industries and positioning the country in the global AI economy. 

“This multibillion dollar investment into Tasmania will bring new skills, hundreds of local jobs, and the opportunity to repurpose industrial infrastructure into a globally relevant AI industry,” Curtis adds. 

Firmus has built a modular AI Factory platform with liquid cooling across the stack that can track NVIDIA’s newest architectures, including  Spectrum X Ethernet networking and NVIDIA Nemotron open models and software for agentic AI workloads. 

Project Southgate is said to be the largest rollout of this platform to date. The system is already in service in Singapore, where it underpins Firmus’s AI cloud for research, enterprise and government.