On one side of a beige building in the Canberra suburb of Hume, there’s the Big River Trade Centre selling building products and timber. On the other, the nation’s capital city bleeds into the bush.
But inside, there’s a factory making big, white, metal boxes to house and cool the cutting-edge AI chips powering the company touted as Australia’s next artificial intelligence champion: Firmus.
If the seven-year-old company’s listing on the ASX this month goes to plan, Firmus will be worth about $44 billion, just a fraction less than Woolworths.
To get there, Firmus is relying on the white boxes it calls “HyperCubes” – the basic building blocks of the ASX-bound company’s claim of “creating the most efficient AI infrastructure” that it will then contract to the likes of Meta to train or operate new AI models.
In truth, the cubes are more like rectangles, but Firmus has always known the power of good branding. The company started as a bitcoin miner, surfing that craze. Then it went all-in on Australian AI, inking a big partnership with established data centre company CDC to build facilities valued at $73 billion.
Now it is emphasising plans for its own facilities in Indonesia and Malaysia for its future.
But as the planned public listing barrels closer, Firmus’ narrative has taken a hit this week.
The boss of Firmus’ partner CDC, Greg Boorer, told online news site Rampart that the deal to build enough data centres to effectively double the nation’s current capacity was off. “They made other choices regarding doing their own data centre developments,” Boorer said.
Firmus co-chief executive Oliver Curtis confirmed the split, saying it had been “mutually agreed earlier this year”. Curtis said it would not affect Firmus’ development plans, strategy, contracted capacity or partnerships.
Despite the staggering dollar value of the scotched deal, its demise may not dent investors’ enthusiasm as one might expect, either. Firmus’ backers, who include billionaire James Packer, former treasurer Joe Hockey and Melbourne identity Alex Waislitz, among a host of more doctrinaire finance types, have already looked past typical red flags such as Curtis’ time in prison for insider trading.
At this point, belief in Firmus is an article of faith – and the weight of money is willing it to become a success. Case in point: emails from Firmus’ bankers, seen by this masthead, show it expects about half of the shares it is offering as part of its public listing to be picked up by “a select group of existing strategic and institutional shareholders, reflecting this group’s strong support”.
Then there’s the fact that Firmus is not being treated as a normal infrastructure company selling warehouses, phone towers or highways. It’s not even really being valued like CDC, which has 20 locations in Australia and New Zealand.
For one thing, Firmus only has two live facilities: a Melbourne location housed within facilities rented from CDC, and another in Singapore. The rest are either being built or planned.
Firmus is pitching itself as a booster rocket for spaceship Nvidia, the $US5.76 trillion ($8.2 trillion) chipmaker that is its major partner and backer. The giant chipmaker sells Firmus its GPUs (graphic processing units), is financially backstopping some of its projects, and has a chunk of Firmus’ shares, too.
When this masthead visited Firmus’ Canberra facility unannounced, its chief development officer Scott Polsen declined to speak on the record or offer a tour, citing the coming listing. But he made clear his belief in the company was iron-clad.
Polsen has good reason to be an enthusiast. Firmus bought a portion of his family’s heating, ventilation and air-conditioning business Benmax – which makes the HyperCubes – for $300 million this year. Of that, $170 million is in Firmus shares, The Australian Financial Review reported.
For everyone else, though, there is an easier way to gain exposure to Nvidia: just buy its shares direct.
The Business Briefing newsletter delivers major stories, exclusive coverage and expert opinion. Sign up to get it every weekday morning.
Nick Bonyhady is the business editor of The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. He is a former deputy federal editor, technology editor and industrial relations reporter.Connect via X or email.From our partners
About the Author
