Nvidia-backed AI startup Firmus secures $10B Blackstone-led loan to build Australia’s AI data center backbone

Firmus Technologies, an Australian artificial intelligence infrastructure startup backed by Nvidia, has secured a $10 billion debt funding package led by Blackstone, with participation from Coatue Capital, the company reported on Monday. The financing ranks among the largest private credit deals ever completed in Australia and signals how quickly capital is reorganizing around AI-driven compute demand.

The global race to build AI infrastructure is no longer abstract. It is being financed, brick by brick, with nine-figure checks and power commitments measured in gigawatts. Australia just entered that race in a serious way.

Bloomberg confirmed the financing, reporting, “Australian AI startup Firmus Technologies Pty. secured a $10 billion loan from a group including Blackstone Inc.-led funds to boost its data center rollout in one of the country’s largest private credit financings.”

The funding will bankroll the next phase of Firmus’ data center rollout across Australia, tied directly to Project Southgate, the company’s long-running effort to build large-scale AI training and inference infrastructure. Once completed, the footprint is expected to reach up to 1.6 gigawatts of capacity by 2028, a scale that places the project in the same category as major national infrastructure projects.

The funding is structured as debt rather than equity, a choice that reflects both the maturity of the assets involved and the appetite among private credit firms for long-dated infrastructure exposure tied to AI workloads.

Firmus said the financing will support the next construction phase of Project Southgate, which is being developed alongside CDC Data Centres and Nvidia. The facilities are expected to host large volumes of Nvidia chips, positioning the sites to serve both AI training and inference demand as enterprise and government workloads move closer to production scale.

Blackstone Bets Big on AI Infrastructure With $10B Loan to Nvidia-Backed Firmus

John Watson, a Senior Managing Director in Blackstone’s Tactical Opportunities Group, said: “The picks and shovels powering the AI revolution are one of our highest conviction investment themes, and we are excited to finance Firmus’ continued growth. AI is driving one of the most significant infrastructure build-outs in decades, and we believe Australia can play a central role in that transformation.”

Blackstone framed the deal as a long-term infrastructure bet rather than a short-term technology play. “The picks and shovels powering the AI revolution are one of our highest conviction investment themes, and we are excited to finance Firmus’ continued growth,” said John Watson, a senior managing director in Blackstone’s Tactical Opportunities Group. “AI is driving one of the most significant infrastructure build-outs in decades, and we believe Australia can play a central role in that transformation.”

This is not Firmus’ first major capital raise. The company raised A$830 million in equity last year across two placements backed by Nvidia and Ellerston Capital, according to Reuters. That earlier funding laid the groundwork. The new $10 billion package moves the story into a different category entirely, shifting Firmus from expansion mode into national-scale execution.

The size of the commitment reflects a broader change in how investors view AI. Capital is no longer flowing only to models, applications, or software layers. It is being deployed into physical assets that supply power, cooling, and compute at an industrial scale. Data centers are becoming strategic infrastructure, and private credit is stepping in to finance them at a pace public markets rarely match.

For Australia, the deal carries wider implications. Building domestic AI infrastructure reduces reliance on overseas compute, strengthens national data sovereignty, and positions the country as a regional hub for AI workloads in the Asia-Pacific. For Blackstone and Coatue, it represents a direct wager that AI demand will continue to absorb capacity long after the current investment cycle fades.

This financing does not read like a speculative bet. It reads like groundwork being poured for a system expected to stay busy for years.

Firmus Founders