Australia’s corporate regulator says it is making inquiries into the failed share market float of Nvidia-backed data centre builder Firmus, which was called off this month after big investors baulked at the price.
Appearing before federal parliament’s Joint Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence, Chris Savundra, executive director of enforcement and compliance at the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC), was asked directly whether the regulator was looking at whether Firmus had misled investors.
“There isn’t a formal investigation on foot at this point, but we are undertaking inquiries ... in the usual course,” Savundra told the committee on Oct. 20.
The issue was first raised by Nationals Senator Ross Cadell, who said he knew a fellow parliamentarian had written to ASIC asking the regulator to look into the float.
ASIC Chief Executive Scott Gregson said the regulator had “limited roles” when a company first offers its shares to the public.
Its main concern was to make sure investors had not been given “misleading or deceptive information,” which was often “something that we’ll consider post-event,” he said.
Oliver Curtis, one of the founders of Firmus, and attends Derby Day at Flemington Racecourse with Roxy Jacenko on November 4, 2017 in Melbourne, Australia. Photo by Scott Barbour/Getty Images
Sydney-based Firmus withdrew its application to list on the Australian Securities Exchange on Oct. 9, two weeks before trading had been due to start.
Its board decided that going ahead was not in the best interests of the company and its shareholders, according to a statement (pdf) passed on to the market by Maas Group, which is both an investor and supplier to Firmus.
The company had planned to sell its shares at $11 each, valuing it at up to $43.7 billion, or almost three times the value put on it two months earlier.
In August, Firmus raised US$2 billion from investors including Nvidia, U.S. investment firm Coatue, private equity group Blackstone, and trading firm Jane Street, at a value of more than US$10.5 billion.
The day before the float was pulled, Marta Khomyn, a senior lecturer in finance and data analytics at Adelaide University, said Firmus had signed contracts for 912 megawatts of computing capacity, a measure of the electrical power its customers have signed up for.
But only 46 megawatts, about 5 percent, was running, compared with roughly a quarter for rivals such as NextDC, Australia’s largest listed data centre company.
She said Firmus also differs from traditional data centre firms, which mostly rent out space and power to customers who bring their own computer chips.
Firmus buys and owns the chips itself, and because chipmaker Nvidia releases new ones every year, older chips lose value fast and the company could be left with outdated equipment.
Firmus has two working sites, in Melbourne and Singapore, and five more due within two years. In September it signed ChatGPT maker OpenAI as an anchor customer for two planned sites in Malaysia, and announced agreements with Facebook owner Meta for computing capacity in Southeast Asia.
Maas Group, a construction and electrical engineering company, has paid $410 million for about 3.2 percent of Firmus (pdf) and holds an $855 million order to build electrical equipment for its centres.
After a sharp fall in Maas’s share price drew a query from the stock exchange on Oct. 8 (pdf), the company halted trading in its shares on Oct. 9 (pdf) while it prepared an announcement about its dealings with Firmus. That afternoon, Maas told the market its electrical business was still delivering on its contracts with Firmus, which had placed orders worth about $1.1 billion across the 2026 and 2027 financial years.
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