Business media startup Rampart reports that CDC founder Greg Boorer told the podcast Rampart Talks his company was unlikely to build further data centres for Firmus.
In a statement to Startup Daily, Firmus CEO Oliver Curtis said Firmus and CDC “mutually agreed earlier this year” not to proceed with the Southgate partnership.
“The decision does not affect Firmus’ current development plans, contracted customer capacity, disclosed strategy or important international partnerships,” he said.
“We remain focused on delivering AI infrastructure projects across our Asia-Pacific portfolio. CDC is a highly respected participant in the Australian data centre sector and we wish them well in their future developments.”
Project Southgate was announced in mid-October 2025, with CDC as the infrastructure provider in a plan to develop 1.6GW of compute at Firmus sites in Tasmania, Melbourne, Perth, Adelaide, Canberra and Sydney by 2028. US chip giant and Firmus investor Nvidia was also part of the project.
The Project Southgate partnership has delivered 42 megawatts in Melbourne, used by Meta with the AFR revealing yesterday that Firmus forgot to pay its first rental bill on time and had to be chased for payment.
It was reported that the Melbourne project, in a CDC centre, will no longer expand to 150MW as a planned.
Last October, when the Australian project was announced, Firmus was valued at $1.85 billion. Just a month later, the business saw its valuation treble to $6 billion in a $500 million raise. At the time the company was announcing a series of deals and raises as it looked to go public in early 2026. The float was delayed until this month.
Firmus is currently raising $7.1 billion as part of its IPO at a $44 billion valuation, and is scheduled to list on the ASX on October 23. The shares are priced at $11.
Startup Daily contacted CDC for comment on the deal ending, but did not receive responses by publication deadline.
It’s not known in what form Project Southgate will continue in, or if timelines will be pushed back when a new infrastructure partner can be found.
Firmus had projected the project would create up to 20,700 direct jobs by 2028. A site in Launceston, Tasmania is currently under construction, with another recently approved at Bell Bay, despite community opposition.
The company describes Southgate as “a long-term initiative to design and deploy sovereign, energy-aligned infrastructure for AI training and inference”.
Before things with CDC fell apart, Firmus announced a $43 billion Indonesian data centre deal with Nvidia in June. Meta has signed up for that compute too.
Meanwhile, institutional bidding for an allocation in the IPO opened today and runs until Thursday, October 9.
Reuters reported that the company planned to allocate about half the offering, including its over-allotment option, to selected existing investors.
The company declined to comment to Reuters on the proposed allocations, which are unconfirmed.
Firmus announced a $2.85bn raise at a $15bn valuation in August. Investors included Nvidia, Coatue, Blackstone and US quant trading firm Jane Street.
While the company still hasn’t made it to the ASX, its CFO is already talking about a US Nasdaq listing, telling the AFR that a dual listing is “certainly something that we’d be thinking about doing”.
Firmus was founded in 2019, originally as a crypto miner, before pivoting to AI data centres in late 2024.
