Firmus Grid IPO Draws Strong Demand, Nvidia and Blackstone Could Raise Stakes

Australian data centre operator Firmus Grid plans to reserve roughly half of the shares in its initial public offering for existing investors, potentially giving Nvidia and Blackstone an opportunity to increase their holdings, Bloomberg News reported Monday.

Firmus Grid is seeking to raise as much as A$5.5 billion ($3.8 billion), including a greenshoe option, as investor demand for the IPO significantly exceeds the number of shares available, according to people familiar with the offering.

Strong interest has prompted the company to accelerate its bookbuilding schedule, moving the deadline to Thursday from Friday. Firmus has priced its shares at A$11 each, giving the data centre company an implied valuation of approximately A$43.7 billion ($30.3 billion).

If completed at the targeted size, the Firmus Grid IPO could become one of Australia's largest-ever stock market listings. The deal would be comparable with Medibank's landmark 2014 IPO, which raised just under A$5 billion.

Demand for Firmus shares comes as investors increasingly focus on data centre infrastructure supporting artificial intelligence workloads. Nvidia, the world's leading supplier of AI computing chips, and alternative asset manager Blackstone are among the investors that have already committed capital to Firmus.

The participation of major technology and investment companies underscores growing demand for infrastructure capable of supporting increasingly compute-intensive AI applications.

Firmus Grid is expanding its data centre capacity as artificial intelligence drives higher demand for graphics processing units and high-performance computing infrastructure. The company plans to use part of the IPO proceeds to purchase GPUs for its first data centre in Batam, Indonesia.

The planned Indonesian facility forms part of Firmus Grid's broader expansion strategy as demand for AI computing capacity continues to rise across the Asia-Pacific region.

With the IPO heavily oversubscribed and existing shareholders expected to receive a substantial portion of the offering, Firmus Grid's market debut is shaping up to be a major test of investor appetite for AI data centre companies in Australia.