Firmus started out chasing cryptocurrency margins with immersion cooled rigs back in 2019. Six years later, the Australian neocloud is calling itself a pure AI factory builder and reportedly lining up a stock market listing worth as much as $5 billion, according to Bloomberg and the Australian Financial Review, which cited people close to the matter.
The shift says a lot about where cloud infrastructure money is flowing right now. Firmus is apparently targeting an Australian listing as early as the end of October, though the size and timing of the offering could still move. The company has stayed quiet publicly, declining to comment when other outlets asked, even as it began meeting investors across Asia this week, with stops in Europe and the US planned before it heads home.
What makes the timing notable is how fast the valuation has climbed as cloud capacity has turned into one of the hottest assets in tech. Firmus raised $505 million in April, then came back for $2 billion in August at a post money valuation above $10.5 billion. Going public now would mean roughly doubling that number inside a matter of months, assuming the deal lands anywhere near the reported ceiling.
Firmus would not be the first neocloud to try this route. CoreWeave went public in March 2025, and Nscale is reportedly chasing a $3 billion raise of its own this month. A pattern is forming among these cloud infrastructure operators: build fast, sign capacity deals with major AI labs, then head to public markets while investor appetite for cloud and AI compute is still running hot.
Firmus has certainly kept busy on the build side. It has three data center projects underway in Tasmania alone, along with cloud sites in Singapore, Indonesia, and Malaysia. The Malaysia facilities will serve OpenAI under a capacity agreement signed earlier this month, pushing the company’s total contracted cloud capacity past 900MW. Last month it also agreed to acquire the fabrication and design arm of HVAC company Benmax, the business behind its HyperCube modular data center product.
Whether the IPO happens on schedule is still an open question. But a company that once cooled crypto mining rigs now angling for a multibillion dollar listing built entirely on cloud and AI infrastructure says something about how fast this industry rewrites its own story.
