(Sept 23): Australian AI startup Firmus Technologies Pty is in talks with lenders for a roughly US$10 billion (RM40.75 billion) financing deal to buy Nvidia Corp chips for its Indonesian data centre, potentially making it one of Asia’s largest AI infrastructure deals.
The firm is looking to raise about US$7.5 billion in debt spread across senior and mezzanine portions, plus about US$2.5 billion in equity, according to people familiar with the matter, who asked not to be identified discussing private matters. The facility may carry a five-year tenor, the people said.
Firmus declined to comment.
If it goes through, it would be one of the region’s biggest digital infrastructure deals. PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP forecasts Asia-Pacific data centre spending will reach US$8.2 trillion through 2050. In July, Brookfield said it entered into a nonbinding term sheet to fund up to US$9 billion for an AI data centre under construction in South Korea, in partnership with Naver Corp. and Nvidia.
Firmus’ talks come ahead of a planned initial public offering in late October that could raise up to US$5 billion, ranking among Australia’s largest. The proceeds would fund purchases of graphics processing units for its 360MW Nvidia DSX AI Factory campus in Batam being developed with DayOne Data Centers Ltd as part of an eight-year partnership with Nvidia.
Chip financing is becoming the next frontier for AI lenders as banks and private credit expand from funding data centres to the hardware that powers them. Earlier this month, Nvidia-backed Indonesian AI platform Zankore signed a US$3.1 billion loan deal to buy advanced chips.
Like the Zankore deal, this one would include revenue sharing and credit support from Nvidia — the people said — a move to ease concerns about repayment and credit risk. The senior debt could carry an interest margin of around 275 basis points over the Secured Overnight Financing Rate and the mezzanine portion about 725 basis points over SOFR, according to the people.
The financing would add to Firmus’ expanding capital base ahead of the IPO. In February, it secured a US$10 billion loan from a consortium that included Blackstone Inc. to accelerate its data centre rollout in the nation. Six months later, investors including Jane Street committed US$2 billion in equity.
Firmus started out as a Bitcoin mining operation in Tasmania in 2019 and has benefited from surging demand for AI infrastructure in Asia Pacific. It now has seven AI factories across Australia, Singapore, Indonesia and Malaysia, according to its website.
Earlier this month, it announced a multi-year partnership with OpenAI, dedicating some compute capacity from two of its Malaysian sites to the US company.
Uploaded by Arion Yeow