Firmus Technologies Pty Ltd., a startup that plans to build a network of artificial intelligence centers in Australia, has raised $327 million from investors.
The company announced the funding round today. Reuters reported that the investment included contributions from Nvidia Corp. and Sydney-based fund Ellerston Capital. Firmus is now valued at $3.9 billion.
The cash infusion comes three months after the company closed a $215 million round that also included the participation of Nvidia and Ellerston Capital. According to Firmus, the proceeds from both deals will go towards an infrastructure initiative dubbed Project Southgate. The project will see the company build 1.8 gigawatts of data center capacity in Australia by 2028.
Firmus is constructing its flagship campus in the northern Tasmanian town of Launceston. The data center, which is expected to cost $1.37 billion, won’t consume any water on days when temperatures stay below 78.8 degrees Fahrenheit. Launceston only exceeds that threshold about 10 days per year.
Firmus will equip the facility with a rainwater collection and reuse system to further reduce its environmental footprint. According to the company, Project Southgate is expected to use less than 1% of the water required by standard cloud data centers.
Firmus’ Tasmania site is equipped with backup batteries supplied by publicly traded energy company Eaton Corp. Besides protecting the data center from power outages, the battery array will also provide so-called frequency control ancillary services. That means it will help improve the reliability of the local electrical grid.
The electricity that flows through power lines changes the direction in which it travels 50 times per second. That cadence, which is necessary to ensure the grid’s stability, is achieved by maintaining a balance between power supply and demand. Excess demand causes imbalances that can negatively impact power delivery infrastructure.
According to Firmus, its Tasmania data center’s backup batteries can return power to the grid during demand spikes to help stabilize it. The task is carried out by an internally-developed system dubbed Synert. It’s integrated with AI FactoryOS, a custom software platform Firmus uses to manage the hardware in its data centers.
The Tasmania site is expected to host 36,000 of Nvidia Corp.’s top-end GB300 chips. Each accelerator includes two Blackwell Ultra graphics processing units and a 72-core central processing unit. They’re linked together using NVLink-C2C, an interconnect that Nvidia says is 25 times more power-efficient than PCIe.
Firmus plans to follow up the Tasmania data center with sites in Melbourne, Canberra, Sydney and Perth. It will make the facilities’ computing capacity available to not only Australian organizations but also international customers. In June, Firmus joined Nvidia’s DGX Cloud Lepton program, which enables developers to rent AI infrastructure from a network of international data center operators.
Photo: Firmus
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