Singapore AI cloud company Firmus has reportedly raised AU$280 million ($180m) as it prepares to go public on the Australian Stock Exchange.

The firm will use the cash to help fund the build-out of a data center in Tasmania, Australia, according to sources quoted by the Australian Financial Review.

Funds were raised from a group of institutional, high-net-worth, and strategic investors, the report said.

Firmus was founded in 2019 by Oliver Curtis, Tim Rosenfield, and Jonathan Levee.

According to its website, it operates an ‘AI factory’ in Singapore, offering access to Nvidia H100 GPUs in a liquid-cooled data center via the company’s cloud platform, SMC. The SMC site says AI factories in India and Thailand are “coming soon.”

Firmus is an Nvidia partner, and earlier this month announced it had joined the GPU maker’s Lepton marketplace.

DCD reported in 2022 that Firmus had received financial backing from Powerhouse Ventures to build a 20MW immersion-cooled data center in Tasmania, but this data center is not mentioned on the SMC website, and it is not clear if it ever came to fruition.

The AFR report says the company has received funding from Temasek, Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund, and ST Telemedia, which is also based in the city state.