Australian AI player Firmus Technologies Pty is talking with lenders about a financing of around $10 billion to purchase Nvidia Corp. hardware for a site in Indonesia. People with knowledge of the plan shared the outline and asked not to be named, and the company declined to comment. If it lands, the deal would sit among the region's heftiest digital infrastructure raises.
The structure in focus is approximately $7.5 billion in borrowings split between senior and mezzanine layers, alongside about $2.5 billion in equity. The facility may carry a five-year maturity, according to the people.
Similar to the $3.1 billion loan inked earlier this month by Nvidia-backed Indonesian AI platform Zankore, the Firmus package would include arrangements where Nvidia shares revenue and provides credit backing, the people said, aiming to calm worries about repayment and credit risk. Pricing being discussed includes a senior margin near 275 basis points over the Secured Overnight Financing Rate and a mezzanine layer around 725 basis points over SOFR.
Proceeds from the planned listing later in October are slated to help pay for graphics processors for Firmus's 360-megawatt Nvidia DSX AI Factory campus in Batam. Built alongside partner DayOne Data Centers Ltd., the campus falls under a collaboration with Nvidia that spans eight years. Chip financing is becoming the next focus area for AI lenders as funding moves from just data centers to the hardware that runs them.
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This prospective chip financing would expand Firmus's capital stack ahead of its late October IPO, which could bring in up to $5 billion and sit among Australia's larger debuts. The company has already been busy: In February, the company secured a $10 billion loan arranged by a consortium that included Blackstone Inc., accelerating its data-center build-out across the country; Six months afterward, a group of investors, among them Jane Street, put up $2 billion in equity.
The broader backdrop is getting bigger by the month. PricewaterhouseCoopers forecasts Asia-Pacific data center investment to reach $8.2 trillion through 2050, and in July, Brookfield disclosed a nonbinding term sheet outlining up to $9 billion of support for an AI facility being built in South Korea alongside Naver Corp. and Nvidia. Firmus itself started in 2019 as a Bitcoin miner in Tasmania and today counts seven AI factories spanning Australia, Singapore, Indonesia and Malaysia. Earlier this month, it unveiled a multi-year tie-up with OpenAI, allocating some compute from two Malaysian sites.
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