Domyn, the Milan‑born AI specialist, closed a financing round that totals just over $1.1 billion, according to Sifted. Only about one‑tenth of the capital came from equity investors; the remaining ninety percent is structured as debt. The split matters because the money is earmarked for hardware, not headcount.
The centerpiece of the raise is Colosseum, a purpose‑built supercomputer slated for southern Italy. The system will contain 80 Nvidia GB200 NVL72 racks, roughly 6,000 Grace Blackwell chips, and draw around 7 MW of power. Domyn rates the machine at 115 exaflops, a capacity it says is tailored for models exceeding a trillion parameters.
Founded in 2016 as iGenius by Uljan Sharka, the company rebranded to Domyn last year. Its client roster includes banks, insurers, pharmaceutical firms, defence contractors and government agencies. Those customers, Sharka told Semafor, want to own AI models rather than lease access from cloud providers.
Domyn’s financing mirrors a trend among European AI firms that prefer borrowing to fund data‑center builds. Mistral, for example, raised $830 million in debt to construct a Paris‑area facility. Lenders are willing to finance GPU farms on terms that venture capitalists would not offer for pure software bets.
Two Domyn models have already shipped: a smaller version for general enterprise workloads and a larger, mission‑critical system that the company claims can match the performance of GPT‑4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet. Independent benchmarks have not been published.
Looking ahead, Domyn plans to pour $10 billion into its infrastructure over the next three years and to reach €1 billion in revenue in the same period. Trade reporting suggests the firm’s current annual recurring revenue sits in the tens of millions, making the growth target ambitious.
The Italian government’s €1 billion national AI fund and recent legislation penalising AI misuse have created a supportive environment for projects like Colosseum. Domyn has partnered with Nvidia and Abu Dhabi’s G42 group to bring the supercomputer to life.
Critics caution that owning hardware carries risk. Supercomputers depreciate on schedules set in Silicon Valley, and the lifespan of a Blackwell rack may be shorter than the term of the infrastructure debt backing it. The loan terms, investor list and valuation remain undisclosed, leaving analysts to infer the company’s expectations for demand.
Domyn’s last raise in 2024 secured roughly €650 million in project financing at a reported €1.7 billion valuation following a €70 million Series A. The new round exceeds that total, underscoring a shift from market‑focused equity to machine‑focused debt.
This article was written with the assistance of AI.
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