Firmus Technologies will open a A$7 billion (around US$5 billion) share sale on October 6 and list on the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) on October 22, in what would be Australia's second-largest initial public offering at a target valuation of close to A$50 billion.

The deal also serves as a test of how far investors will follow Nvidia's circular financing model, given that the US chipmaker has invested heavily in Firmus.

How the Firmus Technologies IPO will work

Firmus has confirmed it is planning to raise about A$7 billion (around US$5 billion) in its IPO, with shares opening to institutional bidding on October 6. The company then plans to debut on the ASX on October 22. That order — institutions first, retail second, listing last — follows the standard bookbuild sequence used for major Australian offerings, where recorded institutional demand helps determine the final issue price.

At the reported target price, Firmus would be valued near A$50 billion, making it the second-biggest listing in Australian history behind Telstra's 1997 privatization, and bigger than Medibank Private's A$5.68 billion offering in 2014.

The company is due to file its prospectus — the official document laying out its finances and risks — on October 8. Retail investors will then get their turn to bid from October 12 to 19, ahead of the October 22 debut. Because the company is still private, the prospectus will be the first time its detailed finances and risk factors are laid out publicly — the paperwork retail bidders will have on hand when their window opens.

Firmus reportedly hosted a two-week global tour to build demand for the sale. The tour started in Asia, moved through Europe and the United States, and wrapped up with sessions in Sydney and Melbourne, where the company's co-CEOs, Oliver Curtis and Tim Rosenfield, met with investors directly.

How Firmus Technologies reached a A$50 billion valuation

Firmus began as a bitcoin mining business. Its three founders — Tim Rosenfield, Jonathan Levee, and Oliver Curtis — set up the company in Sydney in 2019 and gradually shifted its focus to building “energy-efficient” AI data centers, working with partners such as CDC Data Centres, Megaport, and Nvidia.

Firmus has outlined plans for seven data center sites in total, but only two are running today. The remaining five are still under construction and are expected to be completed within the next two years. How quickly those five projects convert from construction sites into operating capacity is one of the details investors will be able to follow once the company is reporting as a listed business.

Even so, the company's valuation has climbed quickly. In September 2025, Nvidia supported a $330 million funding round that valued Firmus at $1.85 billion. By April 2026, Coatue Management led a $505 million round that pushed the company's value to $5.5 billion. That round was tied to Nvidia's Vera Rubin DSX chip design and brought the total raised over six months to $1.35 billion.

By August 2026, the company's value had jumped again to about $10.5 billion (roughly A$15 billion) after it raised another $2 billion for a project called Project Southgate. At the reported IPO target, Firmus would be worth more than Canva, the design company that is still privately owned.

Firmus's biggest customers are also its biggest backers. In June 2026, it signed a $30 billion (about A$43 billion) deal with Nvidia to build a 360-megawatt AI computing site in Batam, Indonesia, using 170,000 Nvidia chips. Later, on September 8, 2026, Firmus revealed that OpenAI was a customer for two planned sites in Malaysia, a deal that took its total contracted computing capacity above 900 megawatts. Megawatts are the standard measure of a data center's power capacity, and contracted totals like this are how the scale of AI infrastructure pipelines is typically expressed.

Other major investors include Regal Funds Management, Archibald Capital, Tectonic Investment Management, Ellerston Capital, Blackstone, Jane Street, and billionaire investors Alex Waislitz and the Pratt family.

Notably, one of the company's co-CEOs, Oliver Curtis, was jailed about ten years ago, when he was 30, for insider trading that made him $1.43 million. He served 12 months and was released in 2017. He later put $250,000 of his own money into Firmus, back when the whole company was worth just $81 million.

Investors looking for reassurance get it in the form of founders' shares, which will be locked up for a period following the IPO. Only 10% of those shares can be sold after 12 months, and another 39.9% after two years. Lock-ups of this kind are designed to limit how much insider stock can hit the market in the months immediately after listing.

What “circular financing” is, and why it worries investors

Circular financing occurs when a company like Nvidia invests money in another company, and that company then uses the money to buy Nvidia's own products. Critics say this can make revenue and demand look bigger than they really are, because the same dollars are moving in a loop.

Nvidia addressed this criticism openly on its August 26, 2026, earnings call, when chief financial officer Colette Kress told analysts that some people would call it circular financing, but the company sees it differently.

Beyond Firmus, Nvidia has set up financing partnerships with firms such as Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs, and KKR, aiming to unlock more than $500 billion for AI infrastructure. The company's total disclosed financial commitments and guarantees passed $530 billion in July 2026, more than three times their level just three months earlier.

Morgan Stanley analyst Joseph Moore has also defended Nvidia's financing model, arguing that because much of the money comes from outside investors rather than from Nvidia directly, it actually limits the risk of the whole loop unwinding.

Source: Cryptopolitan