Listing would have been Australia’s largest IPO in nearly 30 years
Nvidia-backed cloud-computing company Firmus Grid scrapped plans on Friday for what would have been Australia’s largest initial public offering in almost 30 years, withdrawing its application to list on the Australian Securities Exchange. The company said it was pulling the listing because of “recent market volatility and prevailing market conditions,” and added that “the board determined that the terms on which the offer could proceed would not appropriately reflect the strength of the company’s business and long-term growth outlook,” Firmus said.
The seven-year-old Sydney-based company had been seeking to raise almost US$5 billion at a market capitalization of more than US$30 billion, equivalent to about 43.7 billion Australian dollars. A successful listing would have made Firmus one of the 20 largest companies on an Australian bourse dominated by banks and miners, the largest of which is BHP Group with a market value of about US$216 billion. Only Telstra’s 1997 partial privatization, which raised about US$10 billion, and a 1999 secondary offering that raised US$11.1 billion — Australia’s largest public equity raise on record — would have eclipsed the Firmus deal. Telstra, the country’s largest telecommunications company, has a current market capitalization of more than US$37 billion.
Firmus’s investors include private-equity firm Blackstone and technology-focused Coatue Management. Nvidia, the world’s most valuable company, holds a direct equity stake in Firmus and is simultaneously a customer, a commercial partner, and a supplier of crucial processors and other hardware for Firmus’s operations. Shares had been expected to begin trading on Oct. 26 following a bookbuild jointly led by Bank of America, J.P. Morgan, Morgan Stanley, and Australian broker Morgans.
Firmus sells ready-to-use computing capacity directly to large technology companies including OpenAI and Meta Platforms. The company currently operates two data centers and has five more in development across Australia, Malaysia, and Indonesia. It has access to a US$10 billion debt facility led by Blackstone, which is also an equity investor, but will need substantially more capital to add to its operational footprint.
The Wall Street Journal reported that the move may be another sign that investor appetite for fresh exposure to fast-growing companies could be waning amid surging bond yields, rising global interest rates, and broader macroeconomic uncertainty. Last month, smart-ring maker Oura suspended plans to list on the Nasdaq due to what it called uncertainty in the IPO market.
Some analysts had raised concerns about Firmus’s growth trajectory before the withdrawal. Chris Savage, an analyst at Australian broker Bell Potter, said Firmus shares should trade at a discount to those of CoreWeave, a Nasdaq-listed competitor valued at about US$37 billion that operates more than 50 data centers. “There is execution risk across the remaining planned five sites in terms of potential build delays and/or sites not performing to expectations,” Savage wrote.
Other investors had been more optimistic ahead of the planned bookbuild. In August, Blackstone and Coatue both participated in a US$2 billion equity raise at a US$10.5 billion valuation — well below the levels the public listing had been expected to reach. “Its combination of proprietary IP, manufacturing innovation and a repeatable deployment model creates a compelling platform to serve the growing needs of both AI-native companies and enterprise customers,” Coatue General Partner Robert Yin said at the time.
The withdrawal also raises ongoing questions about the Australian Securities Exchange’s ability to attract and retain large listings. Firmus had been set to become the largest technology company on the ASX, which last month capped listing fees as part of efforts to attract more large IPOs. Executives at Australian technology companies including Nasdaq-listed Atlassian and privately held Canva have attributed their decisions to remain off the ASX to what they see as unreasonably low valuations on offer locally.
Firmus said it will instead pursue private-market capital and consider alternative public and private options.