Firmus Technologies has withdrawn its planned Australian float after investors balked at the price, the valuation and the unknowns surrounding the company and the AI sector it operates in. The Sydney-based startup had been close to listing on the Australian Stock Exchange at a $43.7 billion market capitalisation. The deal would have ranked as the second-biggest float in Australian history and the biggest initial public offering since Telstra listed in 1997, 29 years ago.
It didn't happen. By Friday, the offering was dead.
How the Deal Unravelled
Oliver Curtis, Tim Rosenfield and Jonathan Levee founded Firmus in 2019. The company planned to raise about $7 billion through the listing, then borrow more to build data centres in Australia, Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia. By Wednesday night, reports said bankers were weighing a cut to the share price and valuation, towards $30 billion. On Thursday morning, as Firmus tried to save the offering, it withdrew from a federal parliamentary inquiry into AI. The reported per-share offer fell from $11 to $8.25 by Thursday.
Firmus had previously said it secured $US2 billion ($2.86 billion) in investor commitments, including from Nvidia and Blackstone. Nvidia already held a 7.2 per cent stake and had reportedly provided funding and sold the company chips. Yet investors questioned the offer price, the limited detail in the prospectus and whether rapid growth in AI and data centres would continue.
Firmus withdrew from the parliamentary inquiry as it sought public money for an energy-hungry infrastructure build-out. It stepped back from a public forum examining the technology. The base reporting doesn't say why; it only says this happened as the company tried to save the float.
What the Analysts Said
Morningstar senior market strategist Lochlan Holloway said Firmus was being valued similarly to Woolworths. "The economics look good now and the growth is very fast now, but what that looks like again in five or 10 years is the big question mark," he said.
Philip Wohl of Reliance Investment Research was blunt: "Firmus ran into a wall of AI anxiety right at the time that they had planned to list." He called the company's claim that market volatility prevented it from listing at its desired price "a euphemistic way of describing exactly what happened". "The market is more uncertain now when it comes to AI hardware and, given the perhaps aggressive pricing that they were targeting, they really didn't see the demand," he said.
Jun Bei Liu, co-founder and lead portfolio manager at Ten Cap Investment, said the IPO was overpriced. "The valuation for the company was way too high to start with," she said. "It is almost three times what the valuation was when they raised money just a few months ago." She added that Firmus would likely return to the market because "it's a very capital-intensive business. It requires listed shares."
Commentators also pointed to fears of an AI bubble and concerns among politicians and the public about data centre growth. Investors questioned whether Australia's energy infrastructure could support the centres.
Transparency and Track Record
Floodline Research founder Anna Wu said the limited detail about the offering, together with concerns about Curtis's criminal past, added ambiguity. Curtis served a year in jail in 2016-17 for insider trading before co-founding Firmus as a bitcoin mining company in 2019. "It's no longer 2023, where everything's about big ideas and anything with AI in the name would go past any valuation test," Wu said.
She said tougher conditions sent the broader community a clear signal: "right now an IPO is not a free lunch anymore". Wohl put it plainly: "There were just too many unknowns here and it required too much optimism for investors to take that leap of faith with Firmus."
A Wider Chill
The ASX All Technology Index, which tracks 42 technology-linked stocks, has fallen almost 18 per cent this year, including 9 per cent in September alone. The Nasdaq, by contrast, recently hit record highs and is up 43 per cent in the past year. Australian technology listings lean heavily towards software companies. Investors have sold those stocks in the so-called "SaaSpocalypse", worried AI could undercut their business models.
Holloway said uncertainty has led more Australian companies to delay listings, and the number of ASX IPOs has fallen considerably in recent years. With a surplus of private cash, companies can more easily stay private than float publicly. Analysts expect delayed or withdrawn IPOs to become more common.
Firmus isn't finished. Its founders are seeking further private funding, and the company plans to attempt a Nasdaq listing next year. Wu said it was likely to seek a larger investment from Nvidia, describing the chipmaker's global activity as "going around the world buying anything that it thinks is going to take over in the local market". Holloway said the tie-up made sense: for customers such as Meta and OpenAi, partnering with companies like Firmus can be the only way to access scarce chips. "If you had access to those chips, which Firmus did with its partnership with Nvidia, you can basically name your price," he said. Nvidia was contacted for comment after the failed float.
Why This Matters:
A $43.7 billion listing would have put a company with a criminal-convicted co-founder, a thin prospectus and a retreat from a parliamentary AI inquiry in front of ordinary investors, including super fund members who'd likely hold exposure through index funds. The market's refusal to pay up shows that disclosure and scrutiny still count for something. It also exposes a structural worry: a handful of firms, with Nvidia at the centre, control scarce chips and can "name their price", while questions about energy supply and public concern over data centres remain unresolved. As more companies stay private, less of the AI build-out is visible to public markets, regulators and voters. That's a gap democratic oversight will need to close.