A Debt-Heavy Raise for a Compute Buildout
Domyn, the Milan-based AI company formerly known as iGenius, has raised approximately $1.1 billion to expand Colosseum, the Nvidia-built supercomputer it is constructing in southern Italy. Roughly 90% of the new capital is debt, with the remaining 10% in equity, an unusual split for a company still counted as an AI startup. Domyn was founded in Milan in 2016 and rebranded from iGenius to Domyn in 2025 under chief executive Uljan Sharka. The new financing follows a EUR650 million round the company closed in 2024 at a EUR1.7 billion valuation, meaning Domyn has now raised well over EUR2 billion in total across two years. Sifted, TheNextWeb and TechFundingNews all reported the raise on 20 August 2026, describing it as one of the largest debt-financed AI infrastructure deals to originate in Europe.
Colosseum by the Numbers, Against Domyn's Last Round
Colosseum is the physical asset the new capital is buying, and its specifications explain why the bill is so large. The supercomputer is built around roughly 80 Nvidia GB200 NVL72 systems, packing about 6,000 Grace Blackwell chips, for a combined compute capacity of around 115 exaflops. That places Colosseum among the largest AI computing clusters being built in Europe, and Domyn says it is designed specifically to run large models on European soil rather than on rented capacity from US hyperscalers.
| Round | Amount | Structure | Purpose |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2024 | EUR650 million (EUR1.7bn valuation) | Equity | iGenius/Domyn growth, early Colosseum build |
| 2026 | Approximately $1.1 billion | About 90% debt, 10% equity | Expand Colosseum with Nvidia, southern Italy |
The shift in structure between the two rounds, mostly equity in 2024 and mostly debt in 2026, is itself part of the story, and the next section explains why lenders were willing to take that bet.
Selling Owned Models, Not Rented Access
Domyn's business model is the reason the capital structure looks like infrastructure finance rather than venture finance. The company sells owned, dedicated large language models to customers, not shared access to a general-purpose API, targeting European banks, insurers, pharmaceutical companies, defence contractors and government agencies. Those customers typically cannot or will not run sensitive workloads on rented US hyperscaler infrastructure under current European data-sovereignty rules, so they pay for hardware and models they control outright. Domyn is also the Italian firm the EU Commission picked in June to help build an open-source frontier model on EuroHPC infrastructure through the EUROPA consortium, a separate, publicly funded project distinct from the privately financed Colosseum buildout described here. Domyn.com describes owned infrastructure as the baseline expectation for these regulated sectors, not a premium option.
Why Lenders, Not Just Investors, Bought In
Debt investors do not fund speculative growth; they fund assets with predictable cash flows, and that is the signal embedded in Domyn's 90% debt structure. Sovereign and regulated-industry customers sign long, sticky contracts for dedicated infrastructure because switching providers means re-certifying compliance, data residency and security, which makes the resulting revenue look more like a utility bill than a software subscription. That predictability is exactly what lets lenders underwrite a supercomputer the way they might underwrite a power plant or a toll road, rather than treating it as unsecured startup risk. For Servola's readers, the practical read is that a mostly-debt raise of this size is a stronger durability signal than another headline-grabbing equity round would be, because lenders had to believe the revenue would actually show up.
The Build vs Buy Number Every Owner Should Know
Owning AI infrastructure at this scale costs real money, and Domyn's raise puts an actual figure on what "own, not rent" requires: roughly $1.1 billion in fresh capital, on top of a prior EUR650 million round, to field about 80 GB200 NVL72 systems. Most EU and UK business owners will never build their own Colosseum, but the number is still useful as a benchmark: it shows the order of magnitude a regulated enterprise faces if it insists on fully owned, dedicated AI infrastructure rather than a managed service from a vendor like Domyn or a hyperscaler. For most companies, the realistic decision is not build versus buy but which owned-infrastructure vendor to buy from, and Domyn's raise is evidence that at least one credible European option now has the balance sheet to deliver.
Read next: Renting Frontier AI Is Now a Choice, Not a Must | Even a Trillion-Dollar Lab Must Rent Its Compute
