Singaporean headquartered infrastructure company Firmus Technologies has raised $330 million to accelerate the rollout of Australia’s first green AI factory, with a cornerstone investment from Ellerston Capital and strategic participation from US chipmaker NVIDIA.
The company, which also has offices in Sydney, closed the oversubscribed equity round at a post-money valuation of $1.85 billion. The funds will back “Project Southgate” – a major data centre construction project in northern Tasmania that will house 36,000 NVIDIA GPUs across two stages.
The facility is designed as a modular “AI Factory,” optimised for compute density, energy efficiency, and AI workload flexibility. Firmus co-chief executive Tim Rosenfield said the company’s mission is to “create the most efficient AI infrastructure” across energy, cost, 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,” he said.
Co-chief executive Oliver Curtis described the investment as the beginning of “Australia’s AI factory era,” saying it would deliver new industries, local jobs, and skills development in regional Tasmania.
The project will be located in the Tasmanian government’s newly-declared Green AI Factory Zone, which Premier Jeremy Rockliff framed as a long-term driver of economic momentum for the state.
“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,” Mr Rockliff said.
Firmus has designed its platform to evolve alongside NVIDIA’s latest architectures, including Spectrum-X networking and Nemotron open models, with the company positioning its technology as a cheaper, more energy-efficient alternative to legacy data centres.
The Project Southgate build marks Firmus’ largest deployment to date. Its AI Factory system already operates in Singapore, where it underpins Firmus’ sovereign AI cloud services for research, enterprise, and government.
Morgans acted as sole lead manager for the equity placement, with Highbury Partnership advising Firmus.
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