At a glance
Firmus is raising US$2bn (A$2.9bn) at an A$15.5bn valuation, up from A$1.85bn ten months ago, backed by Blackstone and Nvidia and priced at A$230 a share.
The Australian reports Blackstone led the round with an equity stake of more than US$500m, alongside top-ups from Coatue and Nvidia.
Blackstone led Firmus’ US$10bn debt facility in February. An equity stake now would take it from lender to shareholder in the same company inside five months.
The float stalled on a lukewarm roadshow, so Firmus is raising privately and still targets a listing later in 2026. UniSuper, the fourth-largest super fund, says it will not take part, citing too little disclosure.
Blackstone sits on both sides of Australian AI infrastructure: it owns AirTrunk and, on current reporting, holds both Firmus’ debt and its equity. Macquarie Technology Group and NEXTDC are courting the same kind of infrastructure capital.
Blackstone and Nvidia back Firmus’ US$2bn raise at A$15.5bn
Ten months ago Firmus was worth A$1.85bn. It is now raising capital at A$15.5bn, backed by Blackstone and Nvidia, in the run-up to a float tipped as Australia’s biggest this decade. The AI factory builder run by Oliver Curtis is pulling in US$2bn (A$2.9bn) at A$230 a share, up from A$145 in April, a jump that has made a second member of the Curtis family a paper billionaire.
Firmus confirmed the raise and the A$230 price to Capital Brief on 9 July. The Australian and the AFR report Blackstone as the lead investor and Nvidia adding at least US$500m to its existing holding. The round is private because Firmus’ IPO stalled: it took a pre-IPO pitch to institutions earlier in 2026 and the response was cool, a stall we set out in our read on three AI infrastructure floats. Rather than reprice a listing into soft demand, Firmus raised the capital privately and held the float for later in 2026. An extraordinary general meeting is set for 31 July to approve the raise, on The Australian’s reporting.
What changed between the cool roadshow and the A$15.5bn valuation is the contract book the institutions asked to see. In the last week of June, Firmus and DayOne committed a 360MW Nvidia AI factory campus in Batam, which Firmus says carries US$25bn to US$30bn of committed customer offtake over the first six years of a partnership with Nvidia running to 2034.
Geoff Wilson’s Wilson Asset Management confirmed to Capital Brief that it will add to its stake. Coatue, which led Firmus’ US$505m raise in April, is reported to be topping up again.
Not every institution is convinced. UniSuper, the country’s fourth-largest super fund, will sit the round out. Chief investment officer John Pearce told the AFR on 10 July there was “too much about the business we don’t know”, and said he doubts a float is close after an Australian roadshow he judged poorly received. Ten Cap’s Jun Bei Liu called Firmus “elusive” on the detail of its listing and warned that a good company priced too high is still a bad investment. Some investors say Firmus has not shown how it reaches the US$30bn of committed annual revenue it is targeting for the float. The concern is grounded: Firmus is private, has not disclosed audited financials, and set its A$15.5bn mark in a round that skips the disclosure a listing would force.
Blackstone’s debt-first, equity-second playbook
Blackstone is the name on the register that stands out. The Australian reports the US$1.3 trillion asset manager led the round with an equity stake of more than US$500m, with sources putting the position as high as US$750m. Blackstone has not published the stake, and Firmus confirmed only the raise and its pricing.
If confirmed, the move completes a sequence Blackstone runs often. In February it led a US$10bn debt facility for Firmus through Blackstone Tactical Opportunities and Blackstone Credit and Insurance, with Coatue supporting, described at the time as one of the largest private debt financings in Australian history. An equity stake now would put Blackstone in both the debt and the equity of the same builder inside five months.
Blackstone enters a fast-growing compute platform through senior secured credit first, then takes equity where it can hold a position it likes. Its own AirTrunk announcement states the method plainly: the firm has invested in both the debt and equity of data centre companies including QTS, CoreWeave and Digital Realty. The debt leg is lower risk and secured against contracted infrastructure. The equity leg is where the upside sits if the platform performs.
The vehicles matter to how the position is built. Blackstone Tactical Opportunities is the opportunistic special-situations arm that co-led the Firmus and CoreWeave debt. Blackstone Credit and Insurance is the insurance-backed private credit balance sheet behind large infrastructure lending. Blackstone Infrastructure Partners holds the equity in QTS, AirTrunk and Blackstone’s Pennsylvania power joint venture.
Where Blackstone has been placing its bets
Blackstone calls itself the largest data centre provider in the world, and its disclosures show the pace. Its data centre holdings have grown from about US$55bn in mid-2024 to more than US$150bn by the first quarter of 2026, on top of a development pipeline it puts near US$160bn. Chief executive Steve Schwarzman set the scale in 2024: roughly US$1 trillion of data centre capital expenditure in the United States over five years, and another US$1 trillion outside it. President Jon Gray told clients in May that Blackstone expects to sign about six gigawatts of leasing this year, which he valued at close to US$100bn of data centres, and that the firm has leaned into the business on a global basis.
The recent deal list shows where that capital is landing.
Deal | Date | Value | Structure |
QTS Realty Trust take-private | Aug 2021 | ~US$10bn | Equity; Blackstone Infrastructure plus BREIT |
CoreWeave debt facility | May 2024 | US$7.5bn | Debt; Blackstone-led with Magnetar |
AirTrunk (with CPP Investments) | Dec 2024 | A$24bn+ | Equity; largest APAC platform, Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra |
PPL Pennsylvania power JV | Jul 2025 | 49% stake | Infrastructure equity; gas generation for data centres |
Firmus debt facility | Feb 2026 | US$10bn | Debt; Tactical Opportunities and Credit and Insurance |
Spain (Aragon) build-out | 2024, expanded 2026 | ~EUR12bn | Equity; eight data centres, on-site power |
Anthropic enterprise AI services JV | May 2026 | US$1.5bn | Equity; ~US$300m each from Blackstone, Anthropic and Hellman and Friedman |
Google TPU cloud JV | May 2026 | US$5bn initial | Equity; merchant TPU compute-as-a-service, 500MW in 2027 |
Firmus equity stake (reported) | Jul 2026 | US$500m+ | Equity; lead investor per The Australian |
Source: Blackstone, Firmus, PPL and CPP Investments disclosures and reporting by Bloomberg, CNBC and The Australian, 2021 to 2026. The Firmus equity stake is reported, not company-confirmed.
Across these deals Blackstone owns the landlord platform in AirTrunk, lends to the builder in Firmus, seeds a merchant compute business with Google, funds the power to run it in Pennsylvania, and takes a services position through Anthropic.
What the playbook says about who fits the profile in Australia
Blackstone has signalled it wants to deepen this exposure. Gray named Australia among the opportunity markets the firm is watching beyond its priority regions of the United States, the Gulf, India and Japan, and Blackstone has lined up a reported US$30bn for AI data centres in Japan over three to five years, largely through AirTrunk. Reading the pattern is not the same as reporting a deal, and nothing on the public record has Blackstone running a process on any Australian name. The playbook does describe a profile: contracted platforms anchored by investment-grade tenants, builders with committed offtake, and owners willing to recycle capital. Several Australian platforms carry that profile in public.
Macquarie Technology Group is the clearest fit on stated intent. It has told the market that funding for its planned 150MW Sydney campus, a build it puts at A$2.5bn to A$3bn in growth capital, will come from recycled capital and a development partnership, and that it is weighing longer-term infrastructure investors in its data centres. Capital Brief reported the A$240m option it took over a Sydney campus site in that context. That is a platform inviting the kind of infrastructure capital Blackstone deploys, on the company’s own account.
NEXTDC courts capital at the campus level rather than the corporate one. Its 667MW of contracted utilisation, anchored by a 250MW hyperscale commitment at its S4 Western Sydney site, is the contracted, hyperscaler-backed platform Blackstone paid up for in QTS and AirTrunk. NEXTDC funds itself in public markets, most recently through an A$2.2bn capital plan, and has said it is evaluating capital-partnership structures and joint ventures on its Western Sydney campuses with private capital from 2027. That is the co-ownership entry Blackstone uses, without a change of control.
The builder leg is where the debt-first entry point applies. Firmus is the template. IREN, the Sydney-founded, Nasdaq-listed neocloud that closed about US$3bn of convertible notes in May, and Sharon AI, the NEXTDC-hosted operator heading for the ASX, are the other Australian names raising against contracted AI compute, the same collateral Blackstone lent against at CoreWeave and Firmus. CDC, the Canberra sovereign platform held by Infratil, the Future Fund and Commonwealth Superannuation Corporation, sits in the landlord tier. Its two largest owners increased their stakes in 2025 rather than selling, so CDC fits the landlord profile but is not for sale.
Blackstone runs a separate vehicle for each layer: infrastructure equity for landlord platforms through Blackstone Infrastructure Partners, private credit for builders through Tactical Opportunities and Credit and Insurance, and the BXDC trust it listed in May for stabilised, hyperscaler-leased data centres, against a pipeline it puts near US$25bn. Which Australian platform, if any, it lands on next is the open question.
What it means for Australia
Blackstone’s exposure to Australian AI infrastructure now runs down both sides of the stack. It owns AirTrunk, the largest hyperscale platform in the region, with sites in Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra. It lends to Firmus, the operator behind Project Southgate, the national rollout targeting up to 1.6GW by 2028. On current reporting it now holds Firmus equity as well. We set out the two-sided position when Blackstone and Google launched their US$5bn merchant TPU cloud, and the Firmus equity stake adds to Blackstone’s position across the landlord (AirTrunk), the builder (Firmus) and, through the TPU venture, a second chip supply.
For Firmus, the private round delivers capital at a firm A$15.5bn valuation without submitting to a public order book. The A$15.5bn mark, set by a group that includes the lender that already knows the balance sheet best, becomes the reference point any later listing has to clear. It also hands Firmus a cornerstone register of Blackstone, Coatue, Nvidia and Wilson Asset Management before it faces public investors again.
The raise also puts a second Curtis into the billionaire ranks on paper. Nick Curtis, former Firmus chairman and father of co-founder Oliver, holds a stake now worth more than A$1bn on The Australian’s reckoning, following Oliver Curtis’ debut on the AFR Rich List in May.
What to watch
The extraordinary general meeting on 31 July is the next fixed point. It approves the equity raising and, with it, whatever the final register looks like once Blackstone’s stake is either disclosed or left to reporting. A company statement naming the equity investors would settle the one fact still resting on sourcing.
The float is the second. Firmus plans to go back to investors in late September for a listing targeted at the fourth quarter, when the US$30bn revenue target and the numbers behind it become the test. A private round at A$15.5bn sets the floor a listing has to beat, and the disclosure UniSuper asked for is what a public raise, unlike this one, would force. The energy and water policy Firmus published in late June is part of the same pre-listing case, turning the Australian government’s expectations for AI infrastructure into named commitments.
The third is concentration. A single financier holding debt and equity in one builder, owning the largest landlord in the region and seeding a rival chip cloud is efficient when the AI build-out runs ahead of supply and exposed if it does not. Situational Awareness LP, the fund run by former OpenAI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner, has built billions in put options against the semiconductor layer, a signal we noted in our Blackstone and Google analysis. Certified Strategic does not offer investment advice. Blackstone holds Firmus’ debt and, on current reporting, its equity, owns AirTrunk and is seeding a rival TPU cloud, concentrating an unusual share of Australia’s AI infrastructure behind one financier.