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Firmus\u2019 bankers at Morgan Stanley told clients interested in buying into the Australian data centre start-up in late September that the firm was named for a Latin adjective meaning \u201cstrong, stable, steadfast or secure\u201d.<\/p>\n
But Firmus\u2019 plans for an almost $44 billion stockmarket listing in Australia turned out to be anything but.<\/p>\n
A week that began with the Firmus\u2019 bankers crowing that they had interest from buyers \u201cwell in excess of the offer size\u201d spiralled into price cuts by mid-week and ended with the company\u2019s board pulling its planned listing<\/a> on Friday.<\/p>\n Now the company, led by chief executive Oliver Curtis, will be hoping its backers embody another meaning of \u201cfirmus\u201d that Morgan Stanley provided in the research document seen by this masthead: \u201csteadfast, loyal, or unwavering\u201d. But in an industry where momentum and hype are crucial to staying on the right side of the wild swings in share prices<\/a> that have characterised the AI age to date, that looks far from guaranteed.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n Firmus had been presented to the market as an Australian way to benefit from the surging demand for artificial intelligence data centres amid the debates about copyright, noise and jobs. What had once been a bitcoin mining company now planned to roll out so-called AI factories \u2013 which differ from normal data centres because they are designed to run or train artificial intelligence tools rather than storing information \u2013 in four countries. It inked agreements with AI giants OpenAI, Meta, and Nvidia. \u201cSigning customer contracts of this magnitude, in this time frame, is the \u2018slowly, then suddenly\u2019 part of the Firmus story,\u201d wrote Morgan Stanley.<\/p>\n The bankers pushing Firmus\u2019 plans to sell about $US5.5 billion ($7.9 billion) in stock at the public listing used those contracts to forecast extraordinary growth. The company that recorded $50 million in revenue last financial year would deliver more than $US6 billion every six months in 2029, Bank of America claimed. That could make the company worth between $81 billion and $99 billion, the bank concluded. At $44 billion, more than 800 times its last full year of revenue, Firmus was being sold as cheap.<\/p>\n The Australian market was hungry for a listing like Firmus. Macquarie, which was not involved in the float, told clients as late as Thursday that \u201cFirmus\u2019 anticipated late-October listing could drive a rebound\u201d in the moribund market for new share offerings. Several top flight Australian fund managers had a more direct reason for their enthusiasm for the listing: Ellerston Capital, Regal Partners and Wilson Asset Management all hold stakes in the company.<\/p>\n Related Article Each was clearly comfortable with the unusual background of its leadership. Curtis, the chief executive, was the son of wealthy mining entrepreneur Nick Curtis and had attended the exclusive Sydney private school Riverview. He had the \u201cthe best car in the year to drive to school,\u201d the 2003 graduating yearbook noted. Marriage to influencer and public relations consultant Roxy Jacenko<\/a> followed, and then a hard left turn: the younger Curtis was sentenced to two years jail. He had been taking insider tips from his best friend, fellow Riverview alumni and housemate John Hartman, and trading on the information to make $1.4 million for the pair.<\/p>\n In her 2016 sentencing decision<\/a>, NSW Supreme Court Justice Lucy McCallum said it was \u201ctroubling that, unlike Mr Hartman, Mr Curtis has not embraced responsibility for his offending\u201d. A year later, Curtis walked out of Cooma Correctional Centre on good behaviour<\/a>. Two years after that, he founded Firmus alongside Tim Rosenfield, his cousin and a former lingerie entrepreneur, and Jonathan Levee, who had been married to Curtis\u2019 sister Erin. None had a background in technology. All were poised to have their shares, plus those of the elder Curtis, who had been Firmus\u2019 chairman, collectively valued at more than $10 billion, had the IPO gone to plan.<\/p>\n (This year, Curtis said he now \u201cowns\u201d the crime he committed, saying he had been \u201cstupid\u201d.)<\/p>\n One investor, who had listened to Curtis pitch his company and spoke on condition of anonymity to preserve relationships, said he was convincing. Curtis may not have a technology background, but he had a background in finance and was fluent in the numbers.<\/p>\n \u201cHe paints a very optimistic picture that is easy for investors to fall in love with,\u201d the investor said.<\/p>\n Firmus talks of its HyperCubes, large metal structures that house its AI chips, as a point of difference from rival firms. But it wasn\u2019t the cubes, made by a division of an industrial air conditioning company on the outskirts of Canberra<\/a> that Firmus bought last month, that impressed the investor. It was the contracts. Yet as Bank of America and Morgan Stanley made clear to their clients, the deals signed by Meta, OpenAI and Nvidia to support Firmus are not ironclad guarantees.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n Meta has agreed to buy the computing power from Firmus\u2019 Australian sites, Morgan Stanley told clients, while OpenAI had made a similar agreement for the company\u2019s South-East Asia facilities. But both of those contracts cover only a relatively small proportion of the computing capacity Firmus is hoping to build. The rest is \u201can option to acquire additional compute capacity\u201d, Morgan Stanley noted. In other words: the tech giants have first dibs at whatever computing power Firmus generates. They are under no obligation to buy. And most of that computing capacity does not exist yet. Just four per cent of Firmus\u2019 planned revenue comes from the two facilities it currently operates, and one of those is inside a data centre in Melbourne owned by a rival called CDC. To build those data centres, Morgan Stanley told clients Firmus would rely on debt to cover 80-90 per cent of the cost. The bank was contacted for comment; Bank of America declined to comment, citing its usual practice on deals.<\/p>\n In the end, Firmus\u2019 contracts were not the \u201cslowly, then suddenly\u201d inflection point that the banks had cast them as. That was the unravelling of the float. Despite missives from the bankers presenting the float as an all-but-done-deal on Monday, investors told confidants that they were alarmed that more than half of the shares in the company could be sold on the first day of trading. They were worried about the high price of the shares when so much about the company\u2019s future was uncertain.<\/p>\n A hedge fund, Plato Investment Management, claimed to have identified 30 \u201cred flags\u201d in the company. It noted that Curtis had pitched AI token production as akin to mining. \u201cIt is actually a very good analogy,\u201d Plato declared. \u201cLarge amounts of debt and equity are used to finance expensive equipment and infrastructure today to produce a commodity several years into the future. But the metaphor cuts both ways. Commodity industries are inherently cyclical.\u201d Shortage turns to surplus as speculators rush in, crashing prices, the firm concluded.<\/p>\n As the blows rained down, Firmus\u2019 bankers pulled every lever. They cut the price of shares from $11 to $8.25, and industry sources speculated that Firmus would have gone even lower, had they thought it would save the listing. They discussed a smaller share sale. They mulled changing the terms of the deal that let existing shareholders sell out so quickly. But once panicked talk made its way to the public domain, it was clear nothing would save Firmus\u2019 plans.<\/p>\n![\"In](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/3dfa5005f79ad315a432d7a46c3344ee775c9377.jpeg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"Oliver](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/8d57e98e906664a96ba915c7284a0e50585dcafe.jpeg\")
Oliver Curtis is escorted to a prison truck after being sentenced to two years in jail with a one year non-parole period in June 2016.Daniel Munoz<\/p>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/1791665060_173_51f01388d3ca6a0e49b200c8535da1f1f4927f2e3bf415925546b71ec8525249.jpeg\")
A Firmus facility in Canberra that makes the big white metal boxes to house and cool the AI chips powering the company.Alex Ellinghausen<\/p>\n
![\"Firmus](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/785206c89cba41e30cec5be7b9e911e1c636fd0a.jpeg\")
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