This is the biggest GPU financing for an Australian AI infrastructure company
Gilbert + Tobin (G+T) has assisted AI infrastructure company Firmus with its US$10bn GPU financing facility – a transaction described as one of the biggest private credit financings in Australia’s data centre and AI sector.
The deal is expected to speed up the establishment of key AI infrastructure across the country and places Firmus in a position to quickly scale high-performance AI compute capacity and keep pace with high demand from hyperscalers and blue-chip AI customers, G+T said. It will finance the next phase of Firmus’ Project Southgate, which fepresents the national rollout of Firmus’ AI Factory platform based on the NVIDIA DSX reference architecture.
The firm indicated that this is the biggest GPU financing for an Australian AI infrastructure company. Firmus said in a media release that funds managed by Blackstone Tactical Opportunities, Blackstone Credit & Insurance, and affiliated funds led the financing, which was supported by global investment firm Coatue.
“This financing underscores how quickly AI has become core national infrastructure. Firmus is building at scale and this debt facility puts them at the centre of Australia’s next phase of AI growth”, said special counsel James Frixou, who led G+T’s team on the transaction.
Frixou was supported by lawyers Sophie Barber and Abbey Crawley. Partners Anna Schwartz and Julian Cheng assisted the deal team, as did lawyer Sophie Jiang.
The debt facility will be drawn against executed long-term customer contracts with hyperscalers and other blue‑chip AI customers, the firm said. It is structured to support the staged acquisition and deployment of high‑performance GPU clusters (NVIDIA GB300 chips) and associated networking, storage and data‑centre infrastructure.
G+T indicated that Australia was seeing increased AI infrastructure investment from hyperscalers and vendors due to the changes in the US regulatory landscape. It noted that Melbourne was among the fastest-growing data centre markets in the country; moreover, the Victorian government had developed an “AI Mission Statement” and strategy, committing to the support of investments by limiting red tape, streamlining approvals, and signalling the utilisation of PPPs to boost high-performance computing research.
“AI is driving one of the most significant infrastructure build-outs in decades, and we believe Australia can play a central role in that transformation”, said John Watson, a senior managing director in Blackstone’s Tactical Opportunities Group, in a Firmus media release.
Firmus AI Factories are being built on various sites in Australia, and numerous GPUs are set to deploy. Project Southgate’s power and capacity roadmap is anticipated to scale up to 1.6 gigawatts of infrastructure through 2028.
