A company that started mining Bitcoin in Tasmania five years ago just raised $2 billion at a valuation north of $10.5 billion. Firmus Technologies, which once used renewable hydropower to run crypto mining rigs, has completed one of the most dramatic corporate pivots in recent memory, repositioning itself as a builder of modular AI data centers optimized for Nvidia’s latest GPU architectures.
The funding round, which closed on August 7, nearly doubled the company’s valuation from $5.5 billion in April 2026. Backers include Coatue, Nvidia itself, Blackstone, and Jane Street, a lineup that reads less like a crypto cap table and more like a who’s who of institutional finance and AI infrastructure.
From proof-of-work to proof-of-concept
Firmus was founded in 2019 with a fairly straightforward thesis: Tasmania had cheap, abundant hydropower, and Bitcoin mining was energy-hungry. The math worked. But at some point, the company’s leadership apparently decided that selling shovels during an AI gold rush beat panning for digital coins.
The company now builds what it calls “AI Factories,” modular facilities that use liquid cooling to handle the thermal demands of high-density GPU clusters. These aren’t generic data centers. They’re purpose-built around Nvidia’s DSX AI Factory Reference Architecture, a design framework that Nvidia developed specifically for deploying its accelerators at scale.
