Australia’s artificial-intelligence infrastructure company Firmus Technologies has announced a new funding round of A$500 million (approximately US$325 million), marking its second major raise in two months as it accelerates its flagship initiative, Project Southgate.

The capital injection is backed by US chip giant Nvidia Corporation and domestic investor Ellerston Capital, both of which participated in the company’s recent funding activities.

The company said the new proceeds will support accelerated deployment of data-centre infrastructure, site development and energy agreements across selected Australian locations.

Project Southgate, developed in partnership with CDC Data Centres and Nvidia, targets a total compute capacity of up to 1.6 gigawatts by 2028.

Earlier this year, Firmus closed a A$330 million equity placement that valued the company at about A$1.85 billion, led by Ellerston Capital and including participation from Nvidia.

That raise was designated to support the initial phases of Project Southgate, including facilities under construction in Tasmania and Melbourne.

Co-chief executive Tim Rosenfeld said the latest funding will allow the business to respond to growing demand for AI infrastructure “quickly, cost-effectively, and in line with Australia’s renewable-energy future”.

The company emphasises that its AI “factories” will be powered by renewables, leveraging local grid capacity and modular liquid-cooling technologies to reduce energy consumption and water use compared with traditional data centres.

Project Southgate’s first stage is already under way, with a campus in Tasmania’s newly designated “Green AI Factory Zone” and Melbourne site planned to deliver an initial 150 megawatts of compute capacity by mid-2026, rising to the 1.6 gigawatt target across five sites by 2028. The broader investment required across those sites is estimated at up to A$73.3 billion, according to Firmus’ public materials.

As demand for generative-AI training and inference infrastructure grows, the company’s “sovereign” data-centre strategy positions Australia as a regional hub for AI compute, offering local control, energy reliability and proximity to Asia-Pacific markets.

The fresh capital raise will underpin Firmus’ ambitions to scale its footprint, support startups, enterprises and governments, and potentially prepare the business for an initial public offering in 2026.

The initiative comes amid a broader surge in AI-infrastructure investment globally, with Australia seeking to capture more of the compute value-chain and ensure that domestic data-intensive workloads are hosted on-shore.

With the latest funds committed, Firmus intends to advance its development pipeline, secure energy-supply agreements, expand its technical team and accelerate deployment across regions aligned with renewable-energy generation and transmission capacity.