On 22 October, Firmus Technologies will list on the ASX. The company plans to raise $7 billion at a reported valuation approaching $50 billion, making it Australia's second-largest IPO in history behind only Telstra's 1997 privatisation. It ranks as the fourth-largest IPO globally in 2026 behind SpaceX, China's CXMT and Cerebras. For Australian investors, it is the most significant domestic listing opportunity in a generation.
Firmus is an AI data centre developer, but the comparison to traditional operators stops there. The business secures large-scale power supply and Nvidia GPU infrastructure, then contracts that compute capacity to the world's largest AI companies on long-term agreements. Every facility is engineered around Nvidia's latest architectures, liquid cooling and renewable energy, with proprietary cooling technology that uses 33% less energy and 99% less water than conventional competitors.
The flagship program is Project Southgate, a national network of AI factories targeting 1.6 gigawatts of capacity across Tasmania, Melbourne, Canberra, Sydney and Perth, powered entirely by renewables. Total program investment is estimated at $73.3 billion through 2028, backed by a US$10 billion debt facility led by Blackstone.
Nvidia is both a shareholder and strategic partner, with its DGX Cloud platform running directly on Southgate infrastructure. OpenAI signed as an anchor customer in September, lifting total contracted capacity to more than 900 megawatts across all customers. Meta is widely understood to be among the hyperscale clients. Total contracted capacity now represents more than half of Australia's entire existing data centre infrastructure, a figure that contextualises the scale of what Firmus has built in a short time.
Firmus was valued at $1.85 billion eighteen months ago. It has since moved through $6 billion, $8 billion and $15 billion in successive private rounds before arriving at the $50 billion IPO target. Public investors are being asked to pay roughly three times the valuation of the last private round, a premium that reflects intense institutional demand for liquid AI infrastructure exposure and the step-change in contracted capacity secured over the past year.
A successful listing at this valuation would reset how the ASX prices AI infrastructure stocks broadly. NEXTDC and DigiCo REIT are likely to rerate on read-through. Fast entry into the ASX 200 is anticipated, which would trigger mandatory passive fund inflows. Superannuation funds, which have lacked a liquid ASX vehicle for direct AI infrastructure exposure, represent a significant pool of potential ongoing institutional demand.
Few domestic listings in recent memory have arrived with this combination of strategic backing, contracted capacity and genuine structural tailwinds. The valuation is ambitious. So is the program behind it. For investors with a long-term horizon and an appetite for the infrastructure layer of the AI economy, Firmus represents one of the more compelling entry points the ASX has offered in years.
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