‘There’s always going to be haters’: Firmus doubts emerge as it races to IPO
While big name money is backing Firmus, not everyone in the market is convinced by the story, with its co-founder’s colourful past and sustainability claims among the concerns.
“I guess what we focus on here at Firmus is a cost optimised design for a new asset class, which is different to a traditional data centre, and it’s called an AI factory,” Oliver Curtis told a room full of brokers and investors at a Morgans Investment Breakfast last August.
“Tim [Rosenfield] and I and another co-founder, Jonathan Levee, founded the business about seven to eight years ago. And we had, certainly a little bit of a different background to what traditionally would have been [an] industry style overview of data centres”.
It was intended as a comment on how the three outsiders to the data centre industry had stumbled into building what has become one of the most hyped names in the Australian investment landscape in years — a local company most exposed to the artificial intelligence boom sweeping global markets.
But for more sceptical investors, it could just as easily have referred to something else: Curtis’ own background, which includes an insider trading conviction in 2016 and a year spent in Cooma Correctional Centre.
