TechPulse USA

By the TechPulse USA News Desk They didn't cut the price. They didn't delay the listing. Firmus — the Nvidia-backed Australian data centre company that wanted to go public at a A$43.9 billion valuation, the biggest Australian float since Telstra in 1997 — killed the whole thing on Friday morning. One week the books were "indications of interest well above the offer size." The next, the company walked away and blamed "recent market volatility." Read the second sentence again: a A$44 billion company does not need market volatility as an excuse. What it needed was buyers. It didn't have them. We pulled the Reuters, Nikkei and Straits Times versions of Friday's announcements side by side before writing this — the facts line up, which matters because this story has been spinning for a week and the numbers keep getting rounded in different directions. What follows is what actually happened to Australia's most hyped IPO, who got burned, and what it ...

By Daniel Rao Photo: Melbourne, where Australian AI data centre operator Firmus runs existing facilities. The company has priced a A$7.1 billion IPO — set to be the country's second-largest listing ever — at a valuation that has nearly tripled in under two months. (Bob Tan, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0) Australian data centre operator Firmus has priced what would be the country's second-largest IPO in history. Its valuation has nearly tripled in less than two months. And the fund managers being asked to buy it are openly calling the company "unproven." That combination — a record-breaking listing and a buyer strike at the same time — is what makes the Firmus float the most interesting financial story in AI infrastructure this month. Thursday's pricing, per a term sheet seen by Reuters, went in at A$11 a share — roughly A$7.1 billion (about US$5 billion) for an equity valuation of $30.6 billion. Back at the start of August, a funding round had pri...