Firmus Secures $505 Million Led by Coatue, Valued at $5.5 Billion

Singapore-Based Data Center Builder To Expand Energy-Saving AI Sites In Australia, With Nvidia Involved

Firmus said Monday it closed a $505 million strategic investment round led by Coatue that sets the company’s post-money valuation at $5.5 billion. The funding brings the firm’s haul over the last six months to more than 1 1/3 billion dollars, underscoring rapid investor appetite for new capacity to run large-scale machine learning systems.

The company, headquartered in Singapore, had earlier pulled in about AU$330 million — roughly $215 million — in a prior financing that valued it at about AU$1.85 billion. That earlier syndicate included participation from Nvidia, which has since deepened ties with the data center developer.

Firmus is assembling a string of low-power AI compute campuses in mainland Australia and Tasmania under an initiative it calls Southgate. The builds will follow Nvidia’s hardware blueprints and are planned to host the chipmaker’s next-generation Vera Rubin computing systems, which Nvidia has said are expected to begin shipping in the latter half of 2026. Company executives say the designs aim to reduce power use per unit of compute compared with older architectures.

The startup began by selling cooling equipment to cryptocurrency miners and has pivoted into a provider of specialized infrastructure for artificial intelligence workloads. “Repurposing lessons from crypto mining has helped them move faster on thermal and energy design,” said Priya Anand, a data-center strategist at Horizon Insights. “But scaling to the level investors are betting on will require tight control over power and permitting.”

Nvidia’s involvement signals mutual interest: Firmus gains access to reference designs and a potential customer for its campuses, while Nvidia secures partners to deploy hardware at scale. Analysts say the new cash enables land purchases and construction of multiple sites, though they caution energy availability and regulatory approvals remain practical hurdles.

Management plans to use the fresh capital to accelerate ground-breaking and to expand technical teams ahead of expected hardware deliveries. If timelines hold, the first Vera Rubin-equipped facilities could begin coming online after the systems start shipping, offering more options for companies that need dedicated AI compute outside major U.S. cloud regions.