Nvidia in talks to invest hundreds of millions in Australia's Firmus

Nvidia is in negotiations to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in Firmus, the Australian AI cloud provider that already plans to deploy a large fleet of the chipmaker's hardware, according to Cryptobriefing. If the deal is completed, Nvidia would occupy an unusual dual role — supplying the GPUs Firmus runs on while also holding equity in the company buying them.

The talks surface at a delicate moment for Firmus. On or around October 8, 2026, the company shelved plans for a large Australian initial public offering, pointing to market conditions. The listing had been intended to raise roughly $5 billion, but Firmus instead turned to private funding, targeting a range of $2 billion to $3 billion.

That pivot followed a year of rapid private fundraising. Firmus raised more than $3 billion in equity over the past year, including $505 million in April 2026 at a $5.5 billion valuation. Four months later, in August, it closed a $2 billion round that lifted its valuation above $10.5 billion. Backers include Coatue, Blackstone and Jane Street, and the company is led by co-CEOs Oliver Curtis and Tim Rosenfield.

Firmus did not begin as an AI company. It started as a Bitcoin mining operation before pivoting to infrastructure built for AI workloads, which it now delivers through its proprietary HyperCube platform, itself based on Nvidia technology. The Nvidia relationship deepened on June 28/29, 2026, when the two firms announced a partnership covering an AI factory campus in Batam, Indonesia. Firmus plans to deploy up to 170,000 Nvidia GPUs across a 360 MW site, with work beginning in the first quarter of 2027.

Firmus projects the Batam campus could generate $25 billion to $30 billion in cloud revenue over its first six years, a figure that is the company's own forecast rather than a booked result. Nvidia would stand to benefit both through hardware sales and revenue sharing. Because the campus depends so heavily on Nvidia chips, the prospective investment is likely to draw scrutiny over how much of the demand is organic versus effectively financed by the vendor itself — a pattern observers tend to examine closely when a supplier takes a stake in a customer.

For the crypto sector, Firmus is another illustration of a former Bitcoin miner finding a second life in AI. Mining companies already have hard-won expertise in power procurement and high-density hardware, giving them a head start as the most in-demand compute shifts from hashing to model training. Whether Nvidia's investment materializes — and on what terms — remains to be seen, with the Batam deployment not scheduled to begin until early 2027.