A former Bitcoin miner just raised $2 billion to build AI data centers in Australia. Its valuation has doubled twice in a year.

[Firmus](#/company/firmus), an Australian AI-infrastructure company that started as a Bitcoin miner, said August 6 it had closed a fully subscribed $2 billion strategic equity round, pushing its post-money valuation above $10.5 billion. The round drew follow-on money from existing backers [Nvidia](#/company/nvidia) and Coatue Management, plus new participation from funds managed by Blackstone Tactical Opportunities and other Blackstone vehicles, and from trading firm Jane Street. Firmus frames the raise as fuel for Project Southgate, its plan to build AI-dedicated data centers — what the industry calls "AI factories" — across Australia and, eventually, the wider Asia-Pacific region.

The valuation has now roughly doubled twice inside twelve months: from about $1.4 billion a year ago, past $5.5 billion in April, to above $10.5 billion this month. Total new equity raised across that stretch tops $3 billion, spread across four separate rounds rather than one steadily climbing number — a $330 million Nvidia-backed raise in September 2025, a $100 million round in early 2026, $505 million in April, and now $2 billion in August. Nvidia has been a repeat participant since the first of those rounds, not a new entrant chasing a hot deal — its stake has compounded through every re-pricing since Firmus was still primarily a crypto-mining operation.

The money is earmarked for Project Southgate, Firmus's AI-factory build-out across Australia, and for early groundwork on a separate expansion into Indonesia and the wider Asia-Pacific region. Co-CEO Oliver Curtis said the round "allows us to move on multiple fronts at once. We're scaling across Australia while fast-tracking capacity to expand into wider Asia-Pacific region." Project Southgate's own target, as previously reported, is 1.6 gigawatts of AI compute across five Australian sites by 2028; its first phase, in Melbourne, is 150 megawatts built around 18,500 Nvidia GB300 GPUs. Firmus puts the full build-out's total projected cost through 2028 at A$73.3 billion — an Australian-dollar figure this week's US-dollar raise and the earlier debt facility only partly fund. The pattern is now familiar across the industry: a chip supplier taking an equity stake in the company that buys its hardware, so the same dollars that fund Project Southgate's build-out flow back toward Nvidia GPU orders. AMD's investment in Anthropic and Nvidia's own stake in OpenAI's compute partners follow the same shape — the chipmaker-funds-its-customer pattern this publication has tracked spreading well beyond any single deal.

What the headline numbers don't share

The debt facility is the more telling of the two non-equity numbers. Led by Blackstone's own credit arms rather than a bank syndicate, it was reported at the time as evidence that AI data centers are becoming a "financeable asset class" in their own right — the kind of long-duration, contracted-revenue infrastructure that lenders treat like a toll road or a power plant, rather than the kind of speculative capex that only equity investors will touch. That framing is doing real work for Firmus: it's what lets a company that was mining Bitcoin two years ago borrow $10 billion against data centers that, in Project Southgate's case, are still mostly under construction.

That scoping matters because at least one outlet's headline conflated the currencies: reporting the round as "$2.85 billion at a $15 billion valuation" is the same transaction in Australian dollars, not a different or larger one — Firmus's own release and every US outlet that covered the close use the $2 billion / $10.5 billion figures in US dollars. Both numbers are accurate; they're just denominated differently, and a reader skimming headlines from both currencies could easily conclude Firmus raised two separate rounds in one week. It's a small thing on its own, but it's a preview of a recurring problem in this beat: as more AI-infrastructure deals get struck by companies headquartered outside the US, headline dollar figures will keep arriving in mixed currencies, and a reader comparing this raise against a US-dollar-denominated one elsewhere has to check the denomination before comparing the size.

Firmus describes the round as "fully subscribed," meaning the $2 billion is committed and closed capital, not an in-progress raise or a target the company is still marketing to investors. That distinction matters when comparing it against other AI-infrastructure numbers in circulation this year, several of which describe asks in active talks rather than closed checks — a gap this publication's own funding register only counts on the closed side.

Who's actually carrying the risk

Firmus's pivot mirrors a pattern playing out across the industry: infrastructure that once monetized idle power through Bitcoin mining is being repointed at AI compute, where the same land, power contracts and cooling capacity now command a premium tied to GPU scarcity rather than hash rate. Other former or hybrid miners — including several now pitching themselves as "neoclouds" — have made similar pivots over the past year as mining margins compressed and AI compute demand priced power capacity far above what crypto mining alone could justify. The bet embedded in a $10.5 billion valuation is that this repricing holds for the years it takes Project Southgate to actually fill five sites with paying tenants — not just for the round that just closed, and not just for as long as GPU scarcity itself lasts.