Investors told Firmus Technologies no. The Sydney-based AI startup withdrew its planned Australian float after buyers balked at the valuation, share price and uncertainty surrounding both the company and the AI sector. It’s a sharp rebuke for what would have been the second-biggest stock float in Australian history.
Firmus had been close to listing on the Australian Stock Exchange at a $43.7 billion market capitalisation. That would have made it the biggest initial public offering since Telstra listed in 1997, some 29 years ago. Instead, the market delivered its verdict before a single share traded.
A Price the Market Wouldn’t Pay
Founded in 2019 by Oliver Curtis, Tim Rosenfield and Jonathan Levee, the company planned to raise about $7 billion through the listing. It then intended to borrow more to build data centres in Australia, Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia.
The unravelling was quick. 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 rescue the offering, it withdrew from appearing at a federal parliamentary inquiry into AI. By Friday, the float was dead. The reported per-share offer had already fallen from $11 to $8.25 by Thursday.
Firmus 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. Even so, investors questioned the offer price, thin prospectus detail and whether rapid growth in AI and data centres would last.
Ten Cap Investment co-founder and lead portfolio manager Jun Bei Liu didn’t mince words. "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."
Morningstar senior market strategist Lochlan Holloway said Firmus’s valuation resembled Woolworths’s. "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 blunter about the company's explanation that market volatility blocked its desired price. He called that "a euphemistic way of describing exactly what happened". He added: "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."
Disclosure and Governance Questions
Investors weren’t only weighing numbers. Floodline Research founder Anna Wu said a lack of detail about the Firmus offering and concerns about Curtis’s criminal past added ambiguity. Curtis served a year in jail in 2016-17, about 10 years ago, for insider trading before he co-founded Firmus as a bitcoin mining company in 2019.
Wu also pointed to the broader climate. "It’s no longer 2023, where everything’s about big ideas and anything with AI in the name would go past any valuation test," she said. With oil anxiety hitting the market "every second day" and investors facing a much higher capital cost, she said, the valuation question sharpens. "It probably sends the sentiment signal to the broader community that right now an IPO is not a free lunch anymore."
Investors also questioned whether Australia’s energy infrastructure could support data centres. Commentators cited fears of an AI bubble and concern among politicians and the public about data centre growth.
Local Market Weakness
Wu argued the founders should have tried listing in the United States, where the Nasdaq is a bigger, more accepting market for emerging technology. The numbers back her up. The Nasdaq had recently reached record highs and was up 43 per cent in the past year. The ASX All Technology Index, which tracks 42 technology-linked stocks, had fallen almost 18 per cent that year, including 9 per cent in September 2026 alone. Australian technology listings lean heavily towards software companies, which investors sold off in the so-called "SaaSpocalypse" as they worried AI could undercut their business models.
Holloway said uncertainty had led more Australian companies to delay listings, and the number of ASX IPOs had fallen considerably in recent years. With surplus private cash available, staying private had become easier than floating in public markets. Analysts expect delayed or withdrawn IPOs to become more common.
What Comes Next
Firmus’s founders are seeking further private funding, and the company plans to attempt a Nasdaq listing in 2027. Liu thinks it could try again. "At some stage they do have to come back to the market simply because it’s a very capital-intensive business. It requires listed shares," she said.
Nvidia was contacted for comment after the failed float. Wu said Firmus was likely to seek a larger investment from the chipmaker, describing Nvidia’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 because Firmus’s data centres could put Nvidia’s chips to use. "There is a very, very short supply of Nvidia’s high-quality chips and a lot of demand for AI model training," he said, adding that with access to those chips, "you can basically name your price."
Firmus’s website says it has two operational sites, in Australia and Singapore, and five sites "under development". Wohl summed up the retreat: "There were just too many unknowns here and it required too much optimism for investors to take that leap of faith with Firmus."
Why This Matters: The Firmus withdrawal shows public markets doing what they’re supposed to do: testing a rich valuation against thin disclosure and walking away when the numbers don’t hold up. Investors didn’t accept a backer’s endorsement as a substitute for detail, and a price nearly triple a recent private round couldn’t survive scrutiny. For Australia, the episode carries a harder message. The ASX technology index is down almost 18 per cent while the Nasdaq soars, and IPOs are falling in number. If capital-hungry builders of data centres and energy-intensive infrastructure keep looking offshore or staying private, local investors lose access to growth, and the exchange loses depth. Firmus’s planned Nasdaq attempt in 2027 will test whether the problem was the company or the market it chose.