Firmus puts $11 price tag on $7.1B ASX float, betting on a 44x year

Australian AI data centre builder Firmus has set an $11 share price for its proposed $7.1 billion ASX float, according to a term sheet seen by Reuters.

Reuters reported that the offer implies an equity valuation of US$30.6 billion (A$44 billion) for a company worth just $1 billion 12 months ago — a 44-fold re-rating in a single year.

The company, co-founded by Tim Rosenfield and Oliver Curtis, began life as a bitcoin miner in 2019 before shifting into data centres, which it has rebranded "AI factories." That pivot now sits at the centre of one of the largest equity raisings Australia has seen.

Institutional bidding for an allocation runs October 6-9, with ASX trading scheduled to begin on October 23. The term sheet says indicative orders already exceed the offer. Firmus declined to comment to Reuters.

If completed as priced, the listing will be Australia's second largest IPO, behind only Telstra's 1997 privatisation.

The scale of the raise puts Firmus in rare company on the local bourse, where technology listings of this size are effectively unprecedented. The pricing also sets a clear test for public market investors: whether they are willing to underwrite an AI infrastructure valuation that has multiplied many times over in the space of a year, on the strength of demand for compute capacity that shows few signs of cooling.

The term sheet's disclosure that indicative orders already exceed the offer suggests early institutional appetite is there, though the book does not close until October 9. Firmus itself has stayed publicly silent on the pricing, leaving the term sheet as the primary record of the deal's terms.

For the Australian market, the float represents both a landmark capital raise and an unusual concentration of exposure to a single AI infrastructure thesis. Telstra's 1997 privatisation has stood alone at the top of the IPO rankings for nearly three decades; Firmus is now positioned to slot in behind it.