Firmus Seeks $5 Billion Australian IPO After OpenAI Deal

Firmus Technologies is seeking to raise as much as $5 billion in an initial public offering on the Australian Securities Exchange, targeting a listing at the end of October, Bloomberg reported Monday, citing people familiar with the plans. If it prices anywhere near that figure, it would rank among the largest technology listings Australia has ever seen.

The timing is not incidental. On Sept. 8, Firmus announced OpenAI as an anchor customer under a multi-year partnership covering two dedicated AI Factory sites in Malaysia, pushing the company's total contracted capacity across all customers past 900 megawatts, according to Firmus's own announcement. Firmus and OpenAI declined to disclose the financial terms of the deal or OpenAI's specific power allocation. An IPO filing six days later is the company converting a customer announcement into a valuation event before the number can go stale.

A company that pivoted from crypto to "AI factories"

Firmus was founded in 2019 by Oliver Curtis, Tim Rosenfield and Jonathan Levee, initially focused on cryptocurrency mining and high-performance computing with a specialty in immersion cooling, before repositioning as what it now calls a pure AI factory builder, according to reporting from CryptoBriefing. That repositioning has been expensive to fund and lucrative to hold: Firmus's post-money valuation went from $5.5 billion in April to more than $10.5 billion in August, a near-doubling in four months, on the back of a $505 million raise followed by a $2 billion round that pulled in Nvidia, Coatue Management, funds tied to Blackstone, and Jane Street.

Date	Event	Amount	Resulting valuation
Feb. 2026	Blackstone debt facility	$10 billion	—
Apr. 2026	Equity round	$505 million	$5.5 billion post-money
Aug. 2026	Equity round (Nvidia, Coatue, Jane Street)	$2 billion	$10.5 billion post-money
Sept. 2026	ASX IPO sought	up to $5 billion	listing targeted for late October

The hardware behind the contracted megawatts

The Malaysia sites will run Nvidia's Vera Rubin NVL72 rack-scale systems on Nvidia's DSX AI Factory Platform, integrated with Firmus's own HyperCube infrastructure system, which the company says is manufactured in regional New South Wales, per the Sept. 8 announcement. "This multi-year partnership marks the moment Asia-Pacific becomes a producer of intelligence, not just a consumer," Firmus co-founder and co-chief executive Tim Rosenfield said in the release. Sachin Katti, OpenAI's vice president of compute strategy, said the Malaysia sites "will help us serve growing demand," without naming a figure for how much.

Firmus counts seven AI factories across four countries, Australia, Singapore, Indonesia and Malaysia, with two operational and five under development on a 24-month timeline to service readiness. That is separate from the company's largest single undertaking, Project Southgate, which targets 1.6 gigawatts of AI compute capacity across Australia on its own and has not yet been folded into the 900-megawatt contracted-capacity figure in the same announcement.

The capital math behind 900 megawatts

Set against the roughly $12.5 billion in debt and equity Firmus has raised since February, comprising the $10 billion Blackstone facility, the $505 million April round and the $2 billion August round, the 900 megawatts of contracted capacity implies about $13.9 million of capital raised for every contracted megawatt, and that is before construction finishes on five of the seven sites. An IPO raising a further $5 billion would push that ratio toward $19 million per contracted megawatt, unless a large share of the new capital is earmarked specifically for Project Southgate's uncontracted 1.6 gigawatts rather than the 900 megawatts already under customer agreements.

The Malaysia sites also mark Firmus's first footprint in a fifth market, extending a build-out that until Sept. 8 was confined to Australia, Singapore and Indonesia. Nvidia's own infrastructure vice president, Nico Caprez, framed the expansion in terms of speed rather than geography, saying in the announcement that Firmus's HyperCube-based AI factories would help bring capacity online faster, a claim that is Nvidia's own characterization of a company it holds equity in and cannot be verified independently against a construction timeline that has not yet completed a single Malaysia site.

Nvidia's presence here is not incidental either. The chipmaker is simultaneously an equity investor in Firmus, the technology supplier for Firmus's flagship platform, and increasingly a direct backer of the infrastructure companies buying its own chips, a structure that shows up across the AI buildout and blurs the line between customer financing and vendor demand generation. OpenAI's own infrastructure spending, including the storage rewrite it disclosed for handling 70 million requests a second, is the other half of that loop: the model developer needs compute capacity badly enough to become an anchor tenant for a company it does not control, in a country where it has no existing data center footprint.

What would change this read

The number to watch is how much of the IPO proceeds Firmus earmarks specifically for Project Southgate versus general balance-sheet strengthening ahead of further debt raises. If the bulk of the $5 billion goes toward the uncontracted 1.6 gigawatts, the per-megawatt capital ratio calculated above overstates the real cost of the contracted business, because a large share of the raise would be prepaying capacity nobody has signed for yet. Firmus has not disclosed that split, and the roadshow materials, once filed with the ASX, are where that answer will actually show up.