Firmus's $73 Billion Dream Crashes to Earth at 2.5%

Australian infrastructure company Firmus and data centre operator CDC Data Centres just ended their partnership on Project Southgate, and the gap between ambition and reality has never looked wider. In October 2025, the two companies announced plans to build 1.6GW of AI infrastructure across Australia—the kind of moonshot that gets venture capitalists nodding along to decks about exponential growth. The projected cost? AU$73.3 billion. The actual deployment? About 42MW. That's 2.5 percent of the plan.

For anyone keeping score at home, that's the sound of a $73 billion vision meeting the stubborn insistence of reality.

CDC CEO Greg Boorer hinted at the unraveling in September, citing "misaligned" views on Firmus's expansion strategy, particularly the company's aggressive Asia pivot and its plans for three Tasmanian data centre campuses. Translation: We funded this to scale in Australia. You want to build empires everywhere else. The divorce was mutual, in that special way divorces are mutual when both parties realize the marriage was based on PowerPoint.

Firmus isn't exactly collapsing. The company is pushing forward with its AU$7.1 billion IPO at a AU$44 billion valuation, set to list on the ASX on October 23. Co-chief executive Oliver Curtis said the partnership wind-down "does not affect Firmus's current development plans, contracted customer capacity, or disclosed strategy"—which is corporate speak for: we're fine, this is fine, everything is fine.

But here's what actually happened. Two companies believed in a narrative so hard they convinced themselves it was destiny. Investors, apparently, were less enchanted. The infrastructure hype cycle just met the tyranny of what people will actually pay for, and it turns out that paying for 2.5 percent of your promise is a pretty rough foundation for a AU$44 billion company.

The real lesson isn't about AI infrastructure or data centres. It's that no amount of Nvidia partnerships or billion-dollar ambitions can override the simple question every investor eventually asks: Why should we believe you this time?