Five weeks after it scrapped what would have been Australia’s biggest stock market debut since Telstra, Firmus is asking the companies that rent its computing power to help pay for the next round of construction. The Sydney AI infrastructure company hopes to raise US$3 billion (about A$4.4 billion) privately through new shares, debt and prepayments from customers including Nvidia and Meta, the Australian Financial Review reported Sunday.
The prepayment talks are the furthest along. Three people with knowledge of the plan told the paper they could result in about 12.5% of Firmus’s contracts being paid in advance, money that would fund AI and data center capacity that is not yet built.
That puts Firmus in step with a financing approach spreading across the GPU cloud providers known as neoclouds, where customers pay part of a contract up front. Nebius and CoreWeave both described the practice this month.
The public market was the first plan. Firmus withdrew its ASX offering in early October after demand fell short. It had reportedly aimed to raise about US$5 billion at A$11 a share, a deal that would have valued the company at roughly US$30.6 billion, CNBC reported at the time. The Guardian put the anticipated valuation at A$44 billion. “Firmus will now pursue capital from the private markets and consider alternative public and private market options,” the company said then. The Guardian wrote that the float had run into skepticism over its valuation and forecast earnings for a startup with two small operating sites.
Contracts are the core of the Firmus pitch. In September it named OpenAI an anchor customer for two planned sites in Malaysia and said its total contracted capacity had passed 900 megawatts, according to the company. Its portfolio spans seven AI factories in Australia, Singapore, Indonesia and Malaysia. Two of them, in Australia and Singapore, were operating at the time. Three weeks later, Firmus and Meta signed agreements for GPU capacity in Southeast Asia. Meta already runs Nvidia GB300 NVL72 systems at the Firmus facility in Melbourne.
Private investors were more willing in August. Coatue, Nvidia, Blackstone funds and Jane Street put up a fully subscribed US$2 billion equity round that lifted Firmus’s post-money valuation above US$10.5 billion, the company said. The new target sits between that round and the IPO goal. Customer prepayments could cut how much Firmus has to raise through borrowing or new shares, Investing.com noted in its write-up of the AFR report.
Others in the sector have already gone this way. “Prepayments are now the standard structure of our agreements,” Nebius told shareholders on Thursday. Its third-quarter letter said prepayments on deals signed in the quarter covered more than 100% of the related capital spending, up from 50% to 60% in the second quarter. It expects $10 billion in committed customer prepayments this year and $17 billion to $20 billion in 2027. WebProNews covered those numbers when Nebius reported. CoreWeave said in its third-quarter release that it expects about $9 billion in customer prepayments and deposits in the next three months, alongside financing backed by customer contracts. It has also said it does not intend to issue new parent-level unsecured debt through 2027 at current yields.
Nvidia sits on both sides of the plan. It took part in the August round and is one of the customers named in the prepayment talks, the AFR reported.
As of its September update, Firmus had five of its seven sites still under development, with all targeting ready-for-service within 24 months.
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