Australian data centre developer Firmus Technologies has been valued at up to A$7 billion (US$4.8 billion) in a capital raising supported by artificial intelligence (AI) behemoth Nvidia ahead of an initial public offering (IPO), according to media reports.
Firmus raised A$505 million in a funding round led by Coatue Management LLC, which valued the fast-growing company at about A$5.5 billion, according to this Bloomberg article.
Founded in Tasmania in 2019, Firmus builds and operates large-scale, energy-efficient data centres designed specifically for artificial intelligence workloads, which it rents to AI and other large technology customers.
It calls these centres AI ‘factories’ which are designed to handle the computing demands of AI models and come with energy-efficient cooling systems to reduce power and water usage.
It is a similar model to that used by Amazon’s (NASDAQ: AMZN) Amazon Web Services and Microsoft’s (NASDAQ: MSFT) Microsoft Azure, but is more specialised so it can handle AI-heavy workloads rather than general cloud computing.
The last raising was the third and final tranche of a $1 billion-plus pre-IPO raising, according to this Australian Financial Review newspaper story.
Azzet approached Firmus to comment, but had received no response at the time of writing.
