The Australian company Firmus, a client of OpenAI and Meta, has shelved a listing worth 7 billion Australian dollars due to a lack of buyers at the asking price and is now turning to a private funding round.
It was set to be one of the largest initial public offerings in Australian history, the second-largest after Telstra in 1997. Firmus Grid, an AI data centre operator backed by Nvidia, has finally postponed its planned A$7 billion listing and is instead considering a private placement. Offered at 11 Australian dollars, the shares were set to value the company at nearly 30 billion, taking into account over-allotment options, but the institutional order book, which closed in early October, remained insufficient, as interest from foreign investors had dried up along the way.
A signal for AI infrastructure
Founded in 2019, the company counts Meta and OpenAI among its clients, operates two data centres in Australia and is launching projects in Indonesia. It had raised 2 billion dollars in August at a valuation of over 10.5 billion. Fund managers deemed the asking valuation too ambitious for a company whose bulk of capacity has yet to be built. The setback spread to its shareholders: the share price of Maas Group, one of its backers, plummeted by 30 per cent. The episode serves as a reminder that a high private valuation and contracts with major names in AI do not guarantee public market appetite.
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