I.P.O.

Firmus Pulls Its $30 Billion A.I. Stock Listing

co-produced by AI10. October 2026, 19:57

Server racks with network cables in a data center — Server racks in a data center © Taylor Vick / Unsplash

The A.I. boom has a price tag, and investors no longer want to pay it: The Australian data center operator Firmus has called off its initial public offering in Sydney, just one day after the order books closed. Firmus had sought a valuation of about $30 billion (about €27 billion), according to Bloomberg. According to the Australian broadcaster ABC, it would have been Australia’s biggest I.P.O. since Telstra in 1997.

600 Times Revenue

The problem was the price. Firmus had about $51 million in revenue in its 2026 fiscal year, so the targeted valuation amounted to roughly 600 times sales. In April, the company had been valued at $5.5 billion, and in August at more than $10.5 billion. Bankers cut the offer price from 11 to 8.25 Australian dollars a share, according to ABC, but even that was not enough. “The valuation for the company was way too high to start with,” said Jun Bei Liu, a fund manager at Ten Cap. Firmus blamed market volatility. The analyst Philip Wool called that a “euphemistic” description and said Firmus had simply run into “a wall of AI anxiety.”

Other concerns added to the pressure. Some investors felt the prospectus lacked detail, and many worried that existing shareholders would sell after the listing. The past of the co-founder Oliver Curtis, who was convicted of insider trading in 2016, also played a role, according to ABC. And Australia’s technology index has fallen almost 18 percent this year.

Big Plans, Small Base

Firmus builds data centers for A.I. workloads, so-called A.I. factories. Its customers include Meta and OpenAI. Nvidia owns 7.2 percent of the company and is more than an investor: Together with Firmus, the chipmaker is planning a 360-megawatt campus in Indonesia with up to 170,000 Nvidia chips, provides credit support and receives a share of future cloud revenue. In total, Firmus has 912 megawatts of data centers planned, but only 46 have been built. The company estimates that its five remaining sites will cost $37.7 billion.

The cancellation comes at a nervous moment. A report showing OpenAI’s revenue falling well short of expectations recently sent A.I. stocks lower, and Wall Street is already in an I.P.O. drought.

A Second Attempt Planned

Firmus is not giving up. The company points to $72.8 billion in revenue commitments from customers, and its prospectus projected $5.8 billion in operating profit for 2029. “We think that Firmus indeed has a compelling story. It just doesn’t have a compelling valuation,” said John Pearce of the pension fund UniSuper. The analyst Anna Wu called the Nvidia partnership an endorsement. Firmus now plans a private funding round of $2 billion to $3 billion with existing investors and wants to attempt a Nasdaq listing next year.