Circular financing talks return as Nvidia-backed Firmus plans second-largest Australian IPO

Firmus Technologies will open a $7 billion share sale on October 6 and list on the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) on October 22.

At a target value of near $50 billion, this would be Australia’s second-largest IPO. The deal is also a test of how far investors will follow Nvidia’s circular financing model as the company has invested heavily in Firmus.

How will the Firmus Technologies IPO work?

Firmus has confirmed it is planning to raise about $7 billion Australian dollars (around $5 billion) in its IPO. The company’s shares will be opening for institutional bidding on October 6.

Following that on October 22, the company plans to debut on the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX).

At the reported target price, the company would be valued near $50 billion Australian dollars, making this the second-biggest listing in Australian history behind Telstra’s 1997 privatization, and bigger than Medibank Private’s $5.68 billion Australian dollar offering in 2014.

Firmus is due to file its prospectus, the official document laying out the company’s finances and risks, on October 8. Retail investors will then get their turn to bid from October 12 to 19, ahead of the October 22 debut.

Reports describe that Firmus hosted a two-week global tour in order to build demand for the sale. The tour reportedly started in Asia, moved through Europe and the U.S., and then wrapped up with sessions in Sydney and Melbourne, where the company’s co-CEOs Oliver Curtis and Tim Rosenfield met with investors directly.

How is Firmus Technologies worth $50 billion?

Firmus was initially a bitcoin mining business. Its three founders Tim Rosenfield, Jonathan Levee, and Oliver Curtis set up the company in Sydney in 2019 and over time switched focus to building “energy-efficient” AI data centers, working with partners like CDC Data Centres, Megaport, and Nvidia.

However, out of seven planned sites, only two are running today with the other five still being built and expected to be finished within the next two years.

Despite this, the company’s value has shot up fast. In September 2025, Nvidia supported a $330 million funding round that valued Firmus at $1.85 billion. By April 2026, Coatue Management led a $505 million round and pushed the company’s value to $5.5 billion. That round was tied to Nvidia’s Vera Rubin DSX chip design and brought the total money raised over six months to $1.35 billion.

By August 2026, the company’s value had jumped again to about $10.5 billion (roughly $15 billion Australian dollars) after it raised another $2 billion for a project called Project Southgate. At the reported IPO target, Firmus would be worth more than the design company Canva, which is still privately owned.

Firmus’s biggest customers are also its biggest backers. In June 2026, it signed a $30 billion (about $43 billion Australian dollars) deal with Nvidia to build a 360-megawatt AI computing site in Batam, Indonesia, using 170,000 Nvidia chips. Later on September 8, 2026, Firmus revealed that OpenAI was a customer for two planned sites in Malaysia. The deal took its total contracted computing capacity to above 900 megawatts.

Other big investors include Regal Funds Management, Archibald Capital, Tectonic Investment Management, Ellerston Capital, Blackstone, Jane Street, and billionaire investors Alex Waislitz and the Pratt family.

Notably, one of the co-CEO’s, Oliver Curtis, was jailed around ten years ago, when he was 30, for insider trading that made him $1.43 million. He served 12 months and was released in 2017. He later put $250,000 into Firmus, back when the whole company was worth just $81 million.

Investors looking for reassurance get it in the form of founders’ shares, which will be locked up for a while following the IPO. Only 10% of their shares can be sold after 12 months, and another 39.9% after two years.

What is “circular financing,” and why does it worry investors?

Circular financing is when a company like Nvidia invests money in another company, and that company then uses the money to buy Nvidia’s own products. Critics say this can make revenue and demand look bigger than they really are, because the same dollars are moving in a loop.

Nvidia openly addressed this criticism on its August 26, 2026, earnings call, when its chief financial officer Colette Kress told analysts that some people would call it circular financing, but the company sees it differently.

Other than Firmus, Nvidia has set up financing partnerships with firms like Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs, and KKR, aiming to unlock more than $500 billion for AI infrastructure.

The company’s total disclosed financial commitments and guarantees passed $530 billion in July 2026, more than three times what they were just three months earlier.

Morgan Stanley analyst Joseph Moore has also defended Nvidia’s financing model, arguing that because a lot of the money comes from outside investors and not from Nvidia directly, it actually limits the risk of the whole loop unwinding.

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