Institutional bidding runs October 6–7, with a prospectus due October 8 and retail subscriptions opening October 12–19. An option to issue additional shares could lift proceeds to US$5.5bn (A$7.7bn).
The infrastructure builder, similar NextDC, and AirTrunk, which sold two years ago for $20bn, as well as Nasdaq-listed Sydney GPU provider SharonAI, which is worth $3bn and also contemplating an ASX listing, had looked to float earlier this year, but without a track record, failed to spark initial investor interest. The company is still largely a future promise, which makes it a very large bet on the future of AI for potential investors.
Founded in Sydney in 2019 by convicted insider trader Oliver Curtis, and Tim Rosenfield and Jonathan Levee, Firmus began as a bitcoin miner. It’s now positioned itself as a key player in the local build of “energy-efficient” AI data centres, building partnerships with CDC Data Centres, Megaport and Nvidia.
Curtis and Rosenfield, the co-CEOs, will hold institutional investor meetings in Sydney today and Melbourne tomorrow.
The astonishing rise in the value of Firmus in just 12 months, as it races to a public listing, has been a spectacular example of the AI bubble, given it’s not an “AI gold rush” producer with frontier models, but rather, a picks and shovels supplier.
The infrastructure startup was last month valued at a staggering $15 billion (US$10.5bn) having raised a US$2bn (A$2.85bn) for its proposed $73bn national data centre roll out, Project Southgate.
Firmus was only worth $1.85bn in September 2025 when US chip giant Nvidia backed a $330 million raise to build a data centre in Tasmania. That project has since expanded to three data centres on the Apple Isle, but it’s also attracted controversy and community resistance.
Its previous raise was US$505 million (A$725m) at an A$8bn valuation in April, just weeks after Firmus raised $100m at a $6bn valuation.
Investors include Phil King’s Regal Funds Management, Archibald Capital and Tectonic Investment Management, Melbourne billionaires Alex Waislitz and the Pratt family, and Ellerston Capital.
Previous reporting now suggests a likely target valuation of $50bn – more than Canva – and amount raised for its ASX IPO would only be pipped Telstra’s 1997 float.
Shares held by the founders will be escrowed from immediate sale, with 10% released after 12 months, and another 39.9% after two.
Curtis, husband of publicist Roxy Jacenko, found notoriety a decade ago when, as a 30-year-old stockbroker, he was sentenced to two years in prison for an insider trading scam that netted $1.43 million. He served 12 months before being released in 2017. He went to on to initially invest A$250,000 in Firmus, which, by 2024, was valued at a modest $81 million. Curtis is now a billionaire on paper.
Capital Brief today explored US chipmaker Nvidia’s overlapping roles as investor, equipment supplier and customer in a story about an “entangled… AI romance”. CEO Jensen Huang gave Firmus a shout out during a Goldman Sachs conference earlier this month.
Capital Brief also reported last week that US job advertisements outlined ambitions to deploy around two million GPUs by 2028 and access four to five gigawatts of power – 400% to 500% more power than San Francisco currently consumes. Nvidia is central to those ambitions and Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta a key customer.
Firmus removed those targets from the advertisements after declining the publication’s request for comment.
The postings described nine strategic accounts involving customers already spending, or considered capable of reaching, at least US$1 billion annually on computing capacity. Firmus’s stated ambition was to grow those accounts to US$20 billion in annual business.
Nvidia as a reputation for circular financing loops, especially with OpenAI, where it invests in companies that then spend the money on Nvidia chips.
In June, Firmus announced it had signed a US$30bn (A$43bn) deal with Nvidia to build one of Asia-Pacific’s biggest AI data centres, a 360-megawatt Nvidia DSX “AI factory” in Batam, Indonesia, just 26km from Singapore.
Firmus announced on September 8 that OpenAI would be an anchor customer for two planned Malaysian facilities, taking contracted capacity above 900 megawatts.
At that announcement, two of its seven sites were operational, with five still under development for completion within two years.
The question to be answered in the next month is how strong is the investor appetite for a company that is potentially worth more than Woolworths, but has set to stock its shelves with product.
