Analysis
Firmus Technologies, the Nvidia-backed Australian AI-infrastructure builder, plans to raise up to $5.5 billion in an initial public offering on the Australian Securities Exchange that would value the company at roughly $30.6 billion, Tech Startups reports.
The company has set an indicative price near A$11 a share (about $7.65), investor demand already exceeds the shares on offer, and underwriters moved the institutional bookbuild up to Thursday. The prospectus is due October 12, with trading set to start October 23 on the ASX.
That timeline would make it, GuruFocus notes, the second-largest listing in Australian history, behind only Telstra's roughly $10 billion debut in 1997.
“The prospectus is due October 12, with trading set to start October 23 on the ASX.”
How Firmus Got Here
Firmus builds what it calls modular AI factories running on Nvidia accelerators, with live data centers already operating in Melbourne and Singapore. Its flagship project, Southgate, begins in Tasmania on renewable power and is designed to eventually house some 36,000 Nvidia chips.
By April 2026, Firmus had raised roughly $1.35 billion in equity across three rounds in six months.
That included a $505 million round led by Coatue Management that valued the company at $5.5 billion, with Nvidia participating and Blackstone separately arranging a $10 billion debt package, SiliconANGLE reported at the time.
An August strategic equity round of roughly $2 billion pushed the valuation to about $10.5 billion. The IPO price now on the table would value Firmus at nearly triple that figure after just two months.
The AI-Infrastructure IPO Comp Set
Firmus is going public into a cohort Pulse has tracked closely. Nscale is rounding out its own executive bench ahead of a planned NYSE listing, while CoreWeave remains the live test case for how public markets actually price this category: it trades around a $48.9 billion market cap, up from a $14.2 billion IPO valuation in March 2025 but down roughly 31% from its 2026 highs. Crusoe and Lambda compete in the same GPU-neocloud category without a public listing yet. What sets Firmus apart is geography -- it is pitched as Asia-Pacific's AI-infrastructure champion -- and the degree to which its own backers are also its financiers: Nvidia, Coatue, Blackstone and Jane Street are all named investors in a deal where roughly half the shares on offer are reserved for existing strategic and financial backers rather than new public money.
What The Valuation Implies
At $30.6 billion, Firmus is pricing a tripling in two months on the strength of one $2 billion strategic round and still-uncommissioned capacity.
CoreWeave, by contrast, has been public for 19 months and reports actual quarterly revenue at its current $48.9 billion valuation -- a maturity gap worth weighing against Firmus's own numbers.
Add the August round and Firmus's total 2026 equity raised comes to roughly $3.35 billion -- meaning the IPO alone asks public investors to underwrite a valuation nearly 9 times that invested equity base, before counting Blackstone's separate $10 billion debt facility at all.
The risk critics are already flagging: reserving half the deal for existing investors means the "IPO" price discovery is happening largely among people who already own the stock, not fresh capital reaching Firmus's balance sheet. A valuation that triples before a single quarter of public reporting is close to the setup that left CoreWeave down nearly a third from its highs within its first year and a half as a public company.
Firmus's bookbuild closes Thursday, the prospectus lands October 12, and shares begin trading October 23 -- the next real test of what public investors will actually pay for AI infrastructure still financed mostly by its own suppliers and backers.