The untold, incomplete story of Firmus’ green power grab
A cache of emails released this week to the Tasmanian parliament detail the AI factory’s sustained lobbying efforts in the state. But questions over its energy and water supply remain.
When Nick Curtis wrote to former Tasmanian premier Peter Gutwein in August 2020, pitching the merits of a half-built crypto mining facility run by his son Oliver, he probably didn’t realise how consequential it would become.
Nearly six years later, the lobbying effort Curtis began is still ongoing, and it has emerged as an intriguing subplot in one of the most closely watched IPOs on the ASX in years.
“The facility is designed to cater to the emerging growth in artificial intelligence and specifically machine learning,” Curtis senior, a well known former banker and mining executive, most famously at Lynas, wrote.
“As our first stage use case, and whilst we develop our target market, we will be utilising the facility for cryptocurrency mining. Our belief is that there will be a growing need for a specific service providing low-cost high intensity computing capacity to serve as the engine room for the learning capabilities required in deploying AI features into the future.”
