The tech world believes in second chances, but does Oliver Curtis deserve a third? |
The tech world believes in second chances, but does Oliver Curtis deserve a third?
October 12, 2026 — 4:55pm
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Walking the streets of Singapore, where he lives, Firmus chief executive Oliver Curtis did his best to sound unbothered by the collapse last week of his company’s attempt to list on the ASX at a valuation of nearly $44 billion.
“What happened over the last 48 hours makes no difference to my business,” Curtis said with a straight face over the weekend. He is, in a word, wrong.
As it stands, Firmus is basically a bag of agreements. It has two data centres in operation, but its prospects rest on deals to buy AI chips from Nvidia on the one hand, and to sell the resulting computing power to OpenAI and Meta on the other.
Those agreements, which have not been made public, have numerous caveats but the most important thing to making them a reality is money. Chips are not cheap.
Had the Firmus listing gone ahead as planned, the float would have raised $US5 billion ($7.1 billion). Curtis and his colleagues would have had billions........