Firmus footing
Firmus is speeding towards the ASX with its AI infrastructure pitch, but market nerves are jangling over governance and its shifting strategy.
Every great capital expenditure cycle produces its own class of middleman: the companies that sit between the thing everyone wants and the capital desperate to get in on the action.
In the AI boom, it’s the data centre operators willing to lever themselves to the gills to pack sheds with Nvidia GPUs and get them crunching numbers as soon as humanly possible.
Australia now has two of them sprinting towards the ASX — Firmus and Sharon AI — together pitching investors on tens of billions of dollars in eventual buildout.
As Hugo Mathers and Jack Derwin reported today, appetite for Firmus has been red hot, with early backers already sitting on tidy returns. Ellerston Capital was forced to restructure one of its funds after its Firmus stake ballooned to 30% of the portfolio. Dubbo industrials company Maas Group, meanwhile, sold its construction materials business to tip $100 million in.
