🧠 Food for thought

Implications, context, and why it matters.

Ambitious efficiency claims and a founder’s past shape the IPO narrative

• Firmus seeks a A$6 billion valuation, tied to its proprietary liquid cooling that it says can halve data centre build and running costs versus rivals 1.
• Some industry insiders call the savings estimate extreme 1.
• Firmus says its Tasmanian sites reached a Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) of 1.03, near the theoretical limit and well below the global average of 1.5 1.
• Co-founder Oliver Curtis was convicted of insider trading in 2016, which may raise questions under the Australian Securities Exchange’s good fame and character test for directors ahead of the planned IPO 1.

The new gold rush is financing the picks and shovels of AI

• The deal for roughly 18,400 Nvidia GB300 GPUs for a new Melbourne data centre signals AI buildouts moving beyond the balance sheets of tech giants such as Google or Amazon.
• Specialist builders are drawing private money, with Firmus lining up a US$10 billion debt facility led by funds managed by Blackstone to finance the next phase of Project Southgate plus its “AI Factories” 2.
• The setup lets asset managers back the “picks and shovels” of the AI boom without choosing which AI application will win 2.
• More capital speeds up sovereign AI efforts in Australia, while leaving these focused operators heavily leveraged and reliant on steady demand for AI compute.