Nobody bids, so nobody knows

The Long Read · Ins7ghts Daily, Saturday 10 October 2026

A record is worth whatever the last person paid for it in a room where other people could have bid. Take it out of the auction and you still own the record. You have just stopped knowing the number.

That is the week, in one move. Firmus had the biggest Australian float of the year lined up, with Nvidia money behind it, Meta buying capacity and a data centre business that works. It could not find the demand to price the book at $5 billion, so it withdrew and turned to private investors for the same money. Analysts reading the withdrawal said out loud that investors across the AI buildout face real valuation risk.

Withdrawing is not the same as being wrong

None of Firmus's customers left. No revenue went missing. What failed was the agreement on price, and the company sensibly kept its own mark rather than accept one from a crowd that was bidding lower. Every founder in that position does the same thing. The side effect is quiet and it is permanent: for anyone holding that asset in a model, the last tested price is now older than the asset.

That matters to you if your renewal list has AI infrastructure on it. A vendor's valuation is the cheapest proxy you have for whether it can still fund the capacity it promised you in year three. When the valuation comes from a term sheet rather than an order book, that proxy is an opinion held by people who are paid to hold it.

The private side never blinked

Look at what moved while the listing window was shutting. Reuters put Sequoia-backed Nuvacore at about a $2.5 billion valuation, sourced to people familiar with the round. Crusoe closed $3.9 billion at a $30.9 billion valuation with Nvidia participating. Waymo borrowed $5 billion from PIMCO, Blackstone and Sixth Street. Green AI Cloud is going onto Nasdaq through a SPAC rather than filing a prospectus. Equity, credit and a side door. Three different promises about who gets paid first if the buildout slows, and not one of them tested against a public bid.

Even the week's largest price was set privately. Schneider Electric agreed to pay $23 billion for PTC, the biggest industrial-software deal of the year, negotiated between two parties who both wanted the deal to happen.