Firmus plans a $5B IPO with a $77M first-half loss forecast

Why it matters

Firmus is asking public investors to finance a capital-heavy AI infrastructure buildout while its draft prospectus forecasts a first-half loss and most planned sites remain under development. The IPO will test how much weight investors give contracted demand and long-range earnings estimates before the facilities are operating.

Firmus co-founders Oliver Curtis and Tim Rosenfield are preparing to take Firmus public with a proposed $5 billion IPO, even as a draft prospectus forecasts a $77 million after-tax loss for the first half of its 2027 financial year. Reuters reported the figures on September 24th, citing two people familiar with the draft, and said Firmus is scheduled to begin trading on the Australian Securities Exchange on October 22nd.

Curtis came to data centers from finance and mining engineering, according to The Tech Capital. Before building Firmus, he was convicted in 2016 of conspiring to commit insider trading and sentenced to two years in prison, according to Australia's corporate regulator. The conviction predates Firmus, and the reporting cited here makes no connection between it and Firmus.

The pair's original problem was energy. Firmus says it began designing systems for more than 1,000 GPUs in 2019, and Australian government material describes its early business as bitcoin mining before its move into data centers and AI infrastructure. Firmus' account of its development describes a path from cooling and data-hall research to integrated compute and grid software. The bet is that infrastructure designed around dense AI workloads can earn a place between power supply and the customers seeking large blocks of compute.

The IPO funds a buildout, not a finished network

Reuters said Firmus has two operating data centers, in Australia and Singapore, with five more under development across the Asia-Pacific region, mostly at early stages. The distinction between operating sites and projects still being built is central to the offering: proceeds are intended to fund further capital spending, while the facilities must be completed and put to work before their projected economics can be tested.

The draft prospectus forecasts a $77 million pro forma loss after tax for the six months ending June 30th, 2027. The two Reuters sources said the document contains no forecasts beyond that half-year period and describes Firmus as historically loss-making. The losses are attributed to the cost of developing the business and growing it enough to secure substantial customer agreements, one of the sources said. Firmus declined to comment to Reuters.

A third person cited by Reuters said Firmus estimates its completed data centers could generate $5 billion in combined annual earnings within five years. The report does not specify the currency or define the earnings measure. That projection is a company estimate, not a reported result; the gap between it and the near-term loss forecast is the core financial proposition investors will have to assess.

The $5 billion IPO figure and the $77 million loss figure are reported without a currency designation in Reuters' story. Reuters also said local media have reported a potential post-IPO valuation of up to $60 billion. That valuation is not a confirmed offer price. The proposed share sale would rank as Australia's second-largest IPO, behind Telstra's $10 billion listing in 1997, according to Dealogic data cited by Reuters.

A rapid financing run-up meets public-market scrutiny

Firmus' planned listing follows a concentrated period of fundraising. In August, Firmus announced a fully subscribed US$2 billion equity investment. The round involved follow-on capital from Coatue, NVIDIA, new investment from Blackstone-managed funds, and participation from Jane Street. Firmus said the round brought its new equity raised over the preceding year to more than US$3 billion and put its post-money valuation above US$10.5 billion. RuntimeWire covered that round in its report on Firmus' $2 billion raise.

The IPO would give the founders another pool of capital to build out a business with substantial infrastructure needs. Firmus says it has more than 900 MW of contracted capacity and named OpenAI as an anchor customer in September. Those are company-reported measures of demand; the Reuters report does not detail the contracts' terms, timing or how much capacity has been delivered. Contracted megawatts can help describe a pipeline, but they do not by themselves show how quickly facilities will become operational or how much revenue they will produce.

Firmus frames its product as an integrated AI Factory platform spanning cooling, compute and grid orchestration. Its company materials describe the aim as making AI infrastructure more energy efficient. For Curtis and Rosenfield, the public-market case depends on turning that engineering thesis into operating capacity, securing customers for the facilities as they come online, and managing the capital required to get there. The draft's short forecast horizon leaves investors with a large five-year earnings estimate and a near-term loss, while much of the physical network remains under development.

Reuters said institutional bookbuilding is scheduled to begin October 6th and the prospectus is due to become public October 8th. Those documents will provide investors with the formal terms of the sale and a fuller view of Firmus' financials. For now, the numbers establish the scale of the bet: a proposed offering among Australia's largest, supporting an infrastructure rollout whose most ambitious earnings projection depends on facilities that are not yet built.