Firmus Technologies buys up expensive Nvidia chips and rents them out to companies like Meta that need AI computing power fast. It's called a neocloud, and it's meant to be the ASX's biggest listing story of the year. Instead, on July 31, shareholders will vote on a very different kind of milestone - another injection of cash while the actual IPO keeps slipping further away.
The company has called an extraordinary general meeting asking investors to approve a $US2 billion top-up round, which nearly doubles Firmus' valuation to $15.5 billion. The raise wasn't marketed externally, existing backers took the whole thing, and Nvidia alone put in about $721 million of preference shares at $230 each, up from $145 last round. It's the same chipmaker that first invested in Firmus when it was worth a fraction of that.
The cash funds Nvidia chip purchases for the Launceston project and early works in South Australia. None of it accounts for the data centre Firmus is building on the Indonesian island of Batam, which it says will bring in $43 billion of revenue once it goes live in 2027. Investors will also vote on a share split that cuts each share into 50, so a future retail offer looks like a normal ASX stock instead of a $230-a-share outlier only institutions can afford.
That's the pitch. The problem is almost nobody outside Firmus can actually check it. UniSuper chief investment officer John Pearce told the Financial Review the $150 billion fund won't be investing directly, saying there's simply too much about the business it doesn't know, and that Firmus' investor roadshow earlier this year landed poorly. Ten Cap's Jun Bei Liu said much the same, describing Firmus as still elusive on the details behind its numbers.
Pearce draws a pointed comparison to the dotcom era, when analysts leaned on unconventional metrics like foot traffic because there were no profits to measure. He isn't calling AI a bubble, but he's blunt about the risk of AI. If a company like Anthropic or OpenAI stumbles, the AI infrastructure spending propping up neoclouds like Firmus could dry up fast, and that flows straight through to the chipmaker sitting at the centre of all of it.
For now, Firmus needs to move fast. If the listing drags on past November 30, its preference shareholders get extra shares when they eventually convert, 5 per cent more every six months of delay. That dilutes everyone else's stake, so the clause actually pushes Firmus to list sooner rather than later.
