Monologue: Australia's Dodgiest AI IPO Is A Pale Horse

In late 2024, a company called Fermos emerged from Australia with plans that seemed almost too audacious to be real: an NVIDIA-backed AI data center firm with just $50 million in annual revenue aiming to raise roughly $5.5 billion in what would have been the country's second-largest IPO ever. The pitch was built on a $10 billion loan from Blackstone and a partnership with data center giant CDC to construct $73 billion worth of capacity under a project called Southgate—including the nation's largest data center, promised by April of this year. As host Ed Zitron puts it dryly, "Just any guesses, you know, put down some money, how likely do you think that was?" The answer, it turns out, was not at all. CDC pulled out of the project with only about 2.5% of the capacity built, less than a month before Fermos was meant to go public. What followed was a slow-motion collapse that Zitron argues should serve as a warning for the entire AI infrastructure bubble—and an indictment of how American financial journalism has failed to do its job.

The Anatomy of a Dodgy IPO