Nvidia-Backed Firmus Pulls A$5.5B ASX IPO on Weak Demand

Firmus Grid closed the bookbuilding on its roughly A$5.5 billion Australian IPO on Thursday after the marketed A$11 share price failed to clear, and the Nvidia-backed data-center operator ultimately pulled the float, Bloomberg reported.

Before withdrawing, Firmus cut the offer 25% to A$8.25, taking the implied equity value from almost A$44 billion down toward A$33 billion. The figure investors kept returning to was build-out: only about 5% of the data-center capacity Firmus has sold to customers is actually built and running, well short of roughly 25% at listed rival NextDC. The stumble sits inside a crowded run of AI-infrastructure stories we have tracked across the last 90 days, now 443 and counting.

The ripple hit Maas Group Holdings fastest. The group owns a 3.2% stake in Firmus acquired for about A$410 million; its shares fell as much as 30% in Sydney on the news, their biggest recorded decline, erasing roughly A$517 million in market value, Capital Brief reported.

Firmus said it would now "pursue private market funding while considering other options," citing recent market volatility and arguing the offer would not appropriately reflect its long-term growth prospects, per ABC News. Behind the build sits a US$10 billion debt package led by Blackstone and a US$2 billion equity commitment made in August by Nvidia, Jane Street and Blackstone. Proceeds were earmarked for buying GPUs for Firmus's first data center in Batam, Indonesia, developed with DayOne Data Centers under an eight-year partnership with Nvidia.