Two tech outsiders tried to sell a $44b tech company. It didn’t work

October 9, 2026 — 12:53pm

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Let’s get this straight. Australia should want big, bold technology companies, and it should want them listed here where ordinary investors can share in the upside.

But Firmus was always going to be a hard sell. Just after 9am on Friday, it stopped trying. The data centre start-up withdrew its $43.7 billion sharemarket float, which would have been the largest on the ASX since Telstra in 1997, after big investors refused to pay its price.

Firmus builds what it calls AI factories: data centres packed with Nvidia chips, whose computing power it rents to tech giants such as Meta and OpenAI to run their AI. Unlike most data centre operators, which rent out space and power, it owns the chips itself.

Most of those factories do not exist yet. Firmus runs two data centres, in Melbourne and Singapore, with seven more contracted and four in planning. Of the 912 megawatts of computing capacity it has signed customers up for, just 46 are running: about 5 per cent.

The company asked Australians to buy a skyscraper off the plan. For once, the market asked to see the foundations first.

Is this the AI bubble bursting? Not on this evidence. Spending on AI is still climbing, and chip giant Nvidia announced a $US150 billion share buyback late last month. But investors are getting pickier. Smart-ring maker Oura has delayed its US float, and shares in CoreWeave, Firmus’ closest listed rival, have halved in a year.

The ramifications are significant for its two chief architects – cousins who were set to be........

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