The books closed on schedule, and that was about the only thing that went to plan. Firmus Grid, an Australian data-center operator, finished bookbuilding for its initial public offering Thursday morning without giving the market a clear price or structure, a sign that a deal once marketed as oversubscribed had slipped into doubt.
Firmus had planned to raise about $5.5 billion including a greenshoe option, one of the largest share sales in Australian history and the biggest since Telstra’s roughly $10 billion float in 1997. The company, backed by Nvidia and Blackstone, had marketed shares at A$11 each, a price that implied a valuation of about A$43.7 billion, or roughly $30.4 billion.
That number sat nearly three times above the roughly $10.5 billion valuation Firmus carried in a fundraising round at the start of August, and the climb happened in under two months. Some investors began to balk at the arithmetic. UniSuper, a large Australian pension fund, declined to participate, citing the valuation, according to people familiar with the matter.
The doubts spread to the market for Firmus’s backers. Maas Group Holdings, a Dubbo-based construction group that owns a 3.2% stake in the company, saw its shares fall as much as 30% in intraday trading Thursday and close down more than 20%, its weakest level in months. The ASX asked Maas to explain the move; the company said speculation over whether the IPO would proceed had weighed on sentiment.
Firmus’s early momentum had been real. The company brought the bookbuilding deadline forward from Friday to Thursday after receiving indications from investors well in excess of the offer size, according to people familiar with the matter. But some potential buyers turned cautious over the prospect that existing shareholders would sell into the market soon after the debut, an overhang that compounded what several investors described as an aggressive pricing strategy.
Local media reported Thursday that bankers were trying to salvage the listing by cutting the price to around A$8.25 a share and shrinking the raise to about $3 billion. Firmus has not confirmed that its offer price or size will change, and the deal could still be delayed or pulled. The uncertainty left the fate of one of the year’s most-watched listings unresolved.
Underneath the pricing fight is a question about what Firmus actually earns. The company reported revenue of only about $51 million for its 2026 fiscal year, against a valuation measured in the tens of billions. It has built about 46 megawatts of capacity and plans 912 megawatts, and it counts Meta and OpenAI among its customers. The gap between the current business and the valuation required investors to underwrite a future that has not yet arrived.
The balance sheet added to the unease. Firmus carries roughly $30 billion of debt, about six times its forecast earnings, according to investors who reviewed the numbers, a load that sits heavily on a company still in its start-up phase. Only a fraction of its planned data centers have been built, and critics questioned whether the valuation could be justified by execution rather than ambition.
The company’s own investors have had to confront the repricing. Macquarie, which values Maas’s Firmus stake, set its estimate well below what a A$43.7 billion valuation would imply, a signal that even the bulls were discounting the price at which Firmus had hoped to sell.
The wobble matters beyond one company. Firmus’s float was meant to be a test of whether public markets would still pay peak prices for the AI buildout, and the answer so far is no, at least not at the asking price. Brokers cut the marketed price and shrank the size of the deal, moves that would have been hard to imagine a month earlier, when demand appeared to outstrip supply.
The proceeds were earmarked for a concrete purpose: buying graphics processing units for Firmus’s first data-center project in Batam, Indonesia, developed with DayOne Data Centers under an eight-year partnership with Nvidia. The plan speaks to the scale of the AI buildout, and to the sums it demands before a single dollar of AI revenue arrives.
The stumble lands as sentiment toward AI infrastructure has cooled. Valuations that rose sharply through the first half of the year are now being tested, and investors who once bid up data-center operators are demanding to see revenue and completed projects. A listing in the same sector in the United States was also priced at the low end of its range, a sign that the market has shifted from enthusiasm to scrutiny.
Firmus’s float is not over, but the terms of its victory have changed. A company that hoped to price near the top of a roaring market is now negotiating against investors who want proof before they pay. The outcome will be read as a measure of how much appetite remains for AI infrastructure at the prices of a few months ago.
