Firmus closes $330m raise

SYDNEY – September 16th, 2025

Firmus Technologies, a leader in energy-efficient AI infrastructure, today announced that it has closed a A$330m equity placement with a cornerstone investment by Ellerston Capital, and participation from NVIDIA. The raise, which was materially upsized, also attracted strong interest from both institutional and high-net-worth Australian investors.

The funds will accelerate the development of Project Southgate, Firmus' flagship initiative in partnership with the Tasmanian Government. Located in the newly announced Green AI Factory Zone in northern Tasmania, Project Southgate will establish Australia’s first sovereign, renewable-powered AI factory campus — a facility with 36,000 NVIDIA GPUs built over two stages and optimised for compute density, energy efficiency, and AI workload flexibility.

“Our mission is to create the most efficient AI infrastructure,” said Tim Rosenfield, Co-CEO of Firmus Technologies. “The Firmus AI Factory is built for peak efficiency in every form — cost, energy, water, and space. With efficiency as our foundation, we’re working to change the conversation: giving Australians genuine agency over how AI becomes part of our country’s future.”

Oliver Curtis, Co-CEO of Firmus, added: “Project Southgate is the beginning of Australia’s AI factory era. Building sovereign capability, creating new industries, and ensuring Australia plays a defining role 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.”

Firmus is an NVIDIA Cloud Partner and has designed its modular, liquid-everywhere AI Factory platform to evolve with NVIDIA’s latest architectures — including NVIDIA Spectrum-X Ethernet Networking, NVIDIA Nemotron open models and AI software to support agentic AI workloads. Firmus’ proprietary technology is highly energy-efficient and allows purpose-built AI Factories to be constructed significantly cheaper than legacy data centers, creating more cost efficient AI tokens.

Project Southgate marks the largest deployment of Firmus’ AI Factory platform to date - a system already operating successfully in Singapore, where it underpins Firmus’ AI cloud services for research, enterprise and government.
This announcement follows the establishment of Tasmania’s Green AI Factory Zone in collaboration with the Tasmanian Government. The AI Factories will provide a new digital baseload to support the growth of Tasmania’s renewable energy sector whilst enabling sustainable expansion of AI infrastructure.

“The establishment of the Green AI Factory Zone marks a new era of investment and innovation for Tasmania. We are proud to support Firmus Technologies as it builds Australia’s first green AI factory right here in the North, delivering jobs, skills, and economic momentum for generations to come. By unlocking access to renewable energy for advanced digital industries, Tasmania is leading the way in sustainable infrastructure and sovereign capability for all of Australia. This is about delivering for Tasmania – getting on with creating a bright future in new industries, and working together with industry to seize the opportunities of tomorrow.” said Jeremy Rockliff, the Premier of Tasmania.

The equity round attracted strong participation from Australian institutional investors. "Firmus is pioneering a new era of efficient AI deployment, and we're excited to lead this raise as they expand their sovereign infrastructure footprint," said David Leslie from Ellerston Capital.

Australians will benefit from some of the most cost-effective, low-carbon AI infrastructure in the world — built locally, powered by renewables, and helping to anchor Australia’s role in the global AI landscape.

Morgans was the sole lead manager, with Highbury Partnership acting as financial advisor to Firmus for the raise. The raise closed at a post-money valuation of AUD $1.85 billion.