Firmus, CDC axe Southgate partnership
A lot can happen in a year. Greg Boorer explains why he walked away from the $73 billion deal.
Almost a year ago to the day, Australia's most talked-about IPO candidate Firmus announced a $73 billion partnership with its financier cum investor cum customer, Nvidia, and local data centre industry stalwart, CDC, to build up to 1.6 gigawatts of AI factories all over Australia. Known as Project Southgate, the union was announced with much backslapping and a declaration that the project would deliver sovereign AI capability at scale by 2028.
Fast forward to today and Firmus and CDC are already dissolving their partnership, putting an end to months of speculation about the state of their relationship after Firmus unveiled a string of overseas projects in what can only be described as a big shift in strategy weeks before its mammoth public listing.
Helmed by co-founders and cousins Oliver Curtis and Tim Rosenfield from Singapore, Firmus is expected to float on the ASX this month at a whopping $43.7 billion equity value, which would make it the second largest debut in Australian history after Telstra. And although Firmus counts global players Blackstone, Nvidia, Meta and Temasek as backers, the Aussie equities market remains split into salivators and sceptics all still trying to ascertain what the neocloud company is and isn't.
In a new episode of Rampart Talks to be released in the coming days, CDC founder Greg Boorer revealed his company is unlikely to build any new data centres for Firmus and explained why Project Southgate ended with just 42 megawatts deployed, about 2.5 per cent of its original potential capacity.
