The pricing
Reuters reviewed the term sheet on October 1. Firmus set its IPO price at A$11.00 a share and aims to raise A$7.1 billion, about US$5 billion. That prices the equity at US$30.6 billion. It would be the second-largest IPO in Australian history, behind only Telstra's 1997 privatisation, and the fourth-largest listing in the world this year, according to Dealogic data cited by Reuters.
The markup
In August, Firmus raised $2 billion in equity at a post-money valuation above $10.5 billion. Two months later, the same company is asking public investors to pay roughly three times that. Indicative orders are said to exceed the offer, though that claim comes from the term sheet itself — the seller's own document.
The debt
Analysts at the banks running the IPO estimate Firmus carries around US$30 billion of debt. Add that to the equity and you get an enterprise value of about US$60 billion. The US$5 billion equity raise is real money, but the debt is six times its size. This is a leveraged infrastructure offering wearing the clothes of a tech IPO.
The forecasts are doing a lot of the work. The company expects first-half operating revenue of US$229.7 million alongside a net loss of US$77 million, and targets earnings before interest and tax of US$5.8 billion within two years. One investor described the numbers to Guardian Australia as 'a little bit of a fairytale'.
What exists so far
Firmus currently operates two data centres, in Australia and Singapore, with five more under development across Asia-Pacific. Its backers include Nvidia, Blackstone, Coatue and Jane Street, and it counts OpenAI among its customers. A Blackstone-led US$10 billion debt facility was arranged in February. The company was founded in 2019 as a bitcoin miner.
The test
The listing lands at the end of a quarter in which AI infrastructure financing moved from balance sheets to capital markets: Amazon's GPU sale-leaseback, Broadcom's $42 billion loan to Anthropic, OpenAI's 750-megawatt deal with Cerebras. Firmus is the next chapter — the buildout funded with other people's money, this time from public shareholders. Bookbuilding starts October 6. Whether the orders hold when investors do their own math is the whole story.
Sources
- [1] Reuters, via term sheet (Scott Murdoch, Oct 1 2026): Australia's Firmus prices shares to raise $5 billionRead source
- [2] Zotpaper: Firmus faces investor skepticism ahead of $7bn ASX floatRead source