Failed AI IPO puts fear before FOMO

BHP

09/10/2026 13:00

The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist.  The opinions expressed are his own.
By Antony Currie
MELBOURNE, Oct 9 (Reuters Breakingviews) - Fear of missing out can be a powerful emotion. Firmus Technologies, though, appears to have taken it too far. On Friday the Nvidia NVDA.O - and Blackstone BX.N - backed neocloud firm ditched its IPO after aiming for a A$44 billion ($31 billion) valuation - triple that set in an August funding round and 23 times higher than its worth a year earlier. That and a slew of other worries had potential shareholders in the data center developer switching FOMO for FOGS - fear of getting screwed.
Sure, it wasn't necessarily the best time to try to launch what would have been, at more than $5 billion raised, the biggest initial public offering in Australia in almost three decades. War and geopolitical have made global markets volatile in general - the oil price shot up 5% on Thursday alone, for example. And AI-related stocks have taken hits as concerns grow about the technology: shares in rival neocloud CoreWeave CRWV.O, for example, have fallen 41% since a May peak; Anthropic and OpenAI have both pushed back their own IPO plans.
But all that was known before Firmus co-CEOs Tim Rosenfield and Oliver Curtis embarked on their sales pitch. Until Tuesday they and their advisers were confident they'd secure the price tag they were shooting for. They did, after all, have signed contracts with hyperscalers like OpenAI and said existing owners would buy around half of the offer.
And they touted the firm's lower-cost model, which supporters said would make it the BHP BHP.AX of data centre providers - a clear reference to the Australian-based miner's ability to dig up iron ore more cheaply than rivals, and a rather unsubtle attempt to be viewed in the same light as the country's biggest listed company and one of its biggest exporters and taxpayers.
Trouble is, Firmus has a very short track record, with just 42 megawatts of its hoped-for 1 gigawatt of capacity up and running. It also in the past couple of months shifted from being a mostly domestic player to targeting Asia; while it's understandable to follow your clients, the pivot raised more questions about its ability to hit its targets. Its Australia partner, CDC Data Centres, rubbed plenty of salt into that wound on Tuesday when CEO Greg Boorer said their venture was essentially toast.
Nor did Team Firmus do themselves much of a favour by pushing unconventional valuation metrics and allowing current investors that own almost 60% of the company to sell their stakes as soon as the stock started trading - which would risk tanking the price. It all totted up to turn a sure thing into a mess and shoved FOMO Sapiens into a corner - for now.
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CONTEXT NEWS 
Firmus Technologies withdrew its IPO on October 9, the day it was due to publish its prospectus and after aiming for a price of A$11 a share, which would have given the data centre developer a market worth of almost A$44 billion.
In a statement the company said "recent market volatility and prevailing market conditions" meant "the terms on which the offer could proceed would not appropriately reflect the strength of the Company's business and long-term growth outlook". That came after prospective shareholders baulked at the valuation. 
Firmus also said it would pursue "alternative public and private-market options" for raising capital.

(Editing by Una Galani; Production by Aditya Srivastav)
((For previous columns by the author, Reuters customers can click on CURRIE/antony.currie@thomsonreuters.com))