Firmus Seeks A$7B in Australia’s Biggest AI Float

Firmus Technologies, a Sydney-founded bitcoin miner that reinvented itself as an AI data centre operator, is courting investors for an ASX float that could raise as much as A$7 billion — which would make it the second-largest initial public offering in Australian history, behind only Telstra’s A$14 billion privatisation in 1997. The listing is targeted for late October.

Depending on how much of the company is sold, the raise implies a valuation above A$50 billion. That is a startling number for a business that, as recently as last month, was privately valued at just over US$10.5 billion after a US$2 billion round — itself part of more than US$3 billion in equity raised in a single year.

From mining bitcoin to selling compute

Firmus was founded in Sydney in 2019 by Oliver Curtis, Tim Rosenfield and Jonathan Levee, and it began by mining bitcoin. The pivot was to what the company calls green AI factories: immersion-cooled halls sited near cheap renewable power, rented out for the energy-intensive training and inference workloads that the hyperscalers cannot build fast enough themselves. It is the same trade several bitcoin miners have made — Anthropic leased 191 MW from Riot Platforms for $9.1 billion in August on exactly this logic.

Curtis and Rosenfield are co-CEOs and cousins. Curtis was convicted in 2016 of conspiracy to commit insider trading, having made about A$1.4 million illegally between 2007 and 2008, and served a prison sentence. Prospective retail shareholders will see that in the prospectus, and Sydney private wealth adviser Sam Baker told the ABC that "whether or not there is some resistance across the retail shareholders, that will remain to be seen."

Seven sites in twenty-four months

The plan the roadshow is selling is seven AI data centres across Australia, Singapore, Indonesia and Malaysia inside two years. Tasmania is the anchor: a site at St Leonards near Launceston is under construction, a second at Long Reach in George Town is approved, and a third at Wesley Vale is awaiting approval. Further sites are earmarked for South Australia, Victoria, New South Wales, Western Australia and the ACT.

The customer that matters most is already signed. OpenAI has a multi-year agreement covering two of the Malaysian facilities — the kind of anchor tenancy that turns a construction programme into a financeable revenue line, and the single fact most likely to be doing the heavy lifting in that A$50 billion figure.

What is not yet on the record

No prospectus has been filed with the ASX. Every figure circulating this week — the size of the raise, the valuation, the October date — comes from a two-week global roadshow that starts with investors in Asia before moving to Europe, the US and finally Australia. Until the document lands, these are numbers being tested on fund managers, not numbers a regulator has seen.

The scale is still hard to ignore. A float of this size would be the fourth-largest IPO anywhere in the world so far this year, from a country whose public markets are dominated by banks and miners, for a company whose entire thesis is that someone else will keep needing more compute than they can build. Australian superannuation funds are about to be asked whether they believe that for the next decade. The answer will be public in October.