Firmus eyes Australia's second-biggest IPO with $5.5B listing at $30.6B valuation

Australian AI infrastructure company Firmus is preparing to raise up to $5.5 billion in one of the country's largest-ever IPOs, with investor demand already running ahead of the shares on offer and a valuation nearing $30.6 billion.

The Sydney-based company, which develops and operates modular AI factories using its own energy and cooling technology, pairing data center infrastructure with cloud services aimed at large-scale AI workloads, plans to allocate roughly half of the offering — including the over-allotment option — to selected existing strategic and financial investors, Bloomberg reported, citing people familiar with the matter. Firmus has previously disclosed Nvidia, Coatue, Blackstone and Jane Street among its investors. The company declined to comment on the allocation plans.

The deal has been priced at A$11 per share, or about $7.65, according to a term sheet seen by Reuters, which would value Firmus at about $30.6 billion. Investor interest has reportedly come in well above the offering size, and the banks running the deal now expect to close the institutional bookbuild on Thursday, one day earlier than originally planned. Trading on the Australian Securities Exchange is expected to begin October 23, with the prospectus due to be lodged on October 12. Bank of America, JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley and Morgans are leading the offering.

If it lands near the top of its proposed range, the share sale would rank as the second-largest Australian-listed IPO on record, behind Telstra's $10 billion offering in 1997.

The scale of the IPO is striking on its own, but the speed of Firmus' valuation climb stands out more. The company was valued at roughly $10.5 billion after raising $2 billion in strategic equity in August, a round in which Nvidia and Coatue made follow-on investments and Blackstone and Jane Street participated. At the proposed IPO price, Firmus would be worth nearly three times that just two months later.

That jump reflects intense investor appetite for AI infrastructure, where demand for compute, data centers, energy systems and specialized cooling has made physical infrastructure one of the most closely watched parts of the AI market. Firmus sits directly inside that buildout, operating data centers in Melbourne and Singapore and pushing deeper into Asia-Pacific as demand for AI computing capacity rises. The August equity round came only months after Firmus secured a Blackstone-led $10 billion financing package tied to its Australian AI infrastructure plans.

Now the company is attempting to turn that private-market momentum into one of the biggest public listings Australia has ever seen.