Firmus Broking bad
Don't worry - at least one firm made money from the neocloud.
Anyone hoping we all move on from Firmus will be disappointed. Not only was it supposed to be the largest initial public offering on the Australian Securities Exchange since Telstra in 1997 but it is at the heart of a reckoning for the biggest industry in the world.
And at the risk of stating the obvious, Firmus may not be listing on the ASX any time soon but it's hardly dead in the water either. It’s got 900 megawatts of commitments to build and is one of many neoclouds Nvidia relies upon so that the $US5.2 trillion chipmaker can keep tech giants like Meta hooked on its graphics processing units. Firmus’ backers – yes the same people who insisted the IPO was going to be oversubscribed – now say it’ll be listed on the Nasdaq by the end of 2027 even though the market seems to be screaming the opposite.
Firmus’ co-founders (and cousins) Oliver Curtis and Tim Rosenfield are currently in Berlin to kiss the ring of Nvidia founder Jensen Huang ahead of an AI conference, as first reported by The Australian. Huang usually uses these conferences to spruik the prowess of his many AI-infrastructure offspring, including Firmus. But we’ll have to wait and see if Huang presents his usual slide, complete with hearts, about how much Nvidia loves Firmus. According to those close to the chipmaker, the company was unimpressed with the communications around the Firmus IPO. They said Nvidia was most aggrieved by the lack of transparency from Firmus when it became clear the other three big US backers – Blackstone, Coatue and Jane Street – had cooled on the deal which ultimately forced it to be pulled at the eleventh hour.
