Firmus set out to raise $5.5 billion on the Australian stock exchange this month, and the most telling number in the whole affair is the one nobody has said out loud: the price. Bloomberg reports, citing people familiar with the matter, that the Nvidia-backed data center builder is set to postpone its initial public offering and is weighing a private funding round instead, in talks with existing investors and others. Order-taking for the IPO closed as scheduled on Thursday morning, yet the company gave no clear indication of a price or a deal structure.
That silence is the story. An IPO book is the stack of orders the banks collect before they set a final price, a bit like an auction where every bidder writes down what they would pay before the gavel comes down. When the book closes and the auctioneer says nothing, the room draws its own conclusions.
The deal had been marketed at A$11 a share. Bloomberg's earlier report on the sale, which I read in full via Yahoo Finance's syndication of it, says the offer failed to attract adequate support at that price, and that some investors turned cautious only days after the company said indications of interest were well above the offer size, which would have implied a valuation near $30 billion.
What gave them pause is worth spelling out. Per Bloomberg, Firmus operates two data centers today. Investor documents seen by Bloomberg put its pipeline at 912 megawatts, of which 46 megawatts has been built, and its revenue for the 2026 financial year at $51 million. The company was valued at $10.5 billion in early August after a round that included Jane Street and Blackstone, so the listing asked public investors to nearly triple that figure in two months. About 58 percent of the shares would have been free to trade from day one, Bloomberg adds.
Some of them said so on the record. ABC News quotes fund manager Roger Montgomery on the gap between what the market was told and what it got. "Investors were previously told that indicative orders were already above the size of the offer at $11 a share," he said. The ABC also quotes Ten Cap portfolio manager Jun Bei Liu, who was steering clear of the deal. "Firmus is probably one of the most polarising IPOs I have ever seen," she observed. Bloomberg reports that UniSuper, one of Australia's biggest pension funds, was among the institutions sitting it out.
Here is the engineering underneath the finance. Firmus builds what it calls AI factories, data centers packed with Nvidia graphics processors, and the IPO money was meant to fund construction of the wider network. A megawatt is the unit that matters here because a GPU hall is bought by the power it can feed, not by its floor space, and 46 of 912 is a ratio engineers will have noticed before the bankers did.
The bet investors were asked to make was never about whether AI needs more data centers. It was about whether a company with two sites could build the other 866 megawatts on schedule, with money from customers it has not all signed yet. Bloomberg notes that Accelevation Holdings priced its US debut below its marketed range last month, and that one of Firmus's own lead banks was at the same time pitching an 11 percent yield on a $5 billion loan for a data center complex in Norway. Capital for this buildout is still there. Its price just went up, and Firmus found that out in public.
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