Firmus, an AI infrastructure company that started out as a Bitcoin miner, has raised roughly $2 billion in fresh equity funding at a post-money valuation above $10.5 billion — double what the company was worth after a prior raise just months earlier. The round drew participation from existing backers Coatue and Nvidia, along with new capital from funds managed by Blackstone Tactical Opportunities and other Blackstone vehicles, plus US quant trading firm Jane Street.
Founded in Sydney in 2019, Firmus originally built its business mining Bitcoin before repositioning as a developer of "energy-efficient" AI data centers, forming partnerships with CDC Data Centres, Megaport and Nvidia along the way. The company's total fundraising has now topped $3 billion over the past 12 months alone, capital it says is funding its "Project Southgate" AI factory buildout across Australia, with preliminary work underway to expand into additional Asia-Pacific markets.
A familiar pivot across the mining industry
Firmus's transformation mirrors a broader pattern among Bitcoin miners that built out large-scale power infrastructure and data center capacity during the mining boom, only to find that same infrastructure — cheap power, high-density cooling, large physical footprints — is now extremely valuable to AI companies racing to build compute capacity. Rather than compete purely on mining economics, which have become increasingly difficult amid rising network difficulty and thin margins, some former miners have repositioned their physical infrastructure toward AI hosting and compute, a pivot that can command dramatically higher valuations than mining alone typically supports.
What it signals for infrastructure-heavy miners
Firmus's valuation doubling in a matter of months is a striking data point for other Bitcoin mining operators sitting on power contracts and data center real estate, several of which have flagged similar AI-hosting pivots as a way to diversify revenue beyond mining rewards. With mining machine profitability under pressure — recent industry data has shown a growing share of mining hardware running at a loss — the economics increasingly favor operators who can repurpose their physical infrastructure for AI workloads rather than relying solely on block rewards and transaction fees.
Related: Nearly 23% of Bitcoin Mining Machines Now Running at a Loss
