IREN
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IREN Limited is an Australian-founded data center company listed on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the ticker IREN. It began in 2018 as Iris Energy, a Bitcoin miner built around cheap, stranded renewable power, and from 2024 onward repositioned itself as an "AI cloud" or neocloud operator that rents out Nvidia graphics processing units to large technology companies for AI training and inference. The company is led by its co-founders and co-chief executives, brothers Daniel Roberts and Will Roberts, and is headquartered in Sydney with its main operating sites in Texas and British Columbia. The pivot was crystallized in November 2025 by a roughly $9.7 billion, five-year cloud-capacity agreement with Microsoft, one of the largest deals to come out of the broader migration of crypto miners into AI infrastructure.
Iris Energy was established in 2018 in Sydney, Australia, by Daniel and Will Roberts, who had previously worked in infrastructure investment and development at the Australian bank Macquarie Group. Their thesis was to build institutional-scale computing sites next to "stranded" renewable electricity, meaning abundant, low-cost clean power in remote locations that was hard to monetize at grid scale. Rather than treat Bitcoin as a speculative trade, the brothers framed the business as an energy and infrastructure bet on monetizing power through computation.
The company's first facility opened at Canal Flats, British Columbia, in 2019, built on the site of a closed lumber mill and connected to the BC Hydro grid through an on-site substation. The Canadian sites were attractive because of access to inexpensive hydroelectric power and a cold climate that allows air cooling without consuming water. Iris Energy positioned itself as one of the few listed miners powered almost entirely by renewable energy, with its British Columbia campuses running on roughly 98 percent direct hydro plus renewable energy certificates. To limit exposure to crypto price swings, the company sold its mined Bitcoin for cash rather than holding it on the balance sheet as a treasury asset.
In November 2021, Iris Energy completed its initial public offering on the Nasdaq, pricing shares at $28 to raise about $232 million and valuing the company near $1.5 billion. It traded under the ticker IREN from the start. The next several years were spent expanding mining capacity across British Columbia and, increasingly, into Texas, where the company secured large blocks of grid-connected power on the ERCOT system.
By 2023 and 2024, demand for AI computing was straining the supply of Nvidia GPUs and the power and data center space needed to run them. Bitcoin miners turned out to be unusually well positioned to capture that demand: they already controlled large parcels of land, secured grid interconnections, and operating teams used to running power-dense facilities. Industry analysts estimated that AI and high-performance computing contracts could generate roughly three times the revenue per megawatt of traditional mining, which made converting capacity to AI compelling.
Iris Energy began building out a GPU rental business it branded IREN AI Cloud, buying Nvidia accelerators and offering them to AI developers. In 2024 the company changed its legal name from Iris Energy Limited to IREN Limited, a change approved by shareholders at the annual general meeting held in late November 2024. Management said the rename was meant to better reflect its expanding next-generation data center business while keeping the same ticker and strategy. The company describes itself today as a dual-engine operator: a cash-generative Bitcoin mining segment that funds the build-out of a much larger AI cloud and data center segment.
On November 3, 2025, IREN announced a multi-year GPU cloud services contract with Microsoft with a total value of approximately $9.7 billion, the agreement that most clearly marked its arrival as an AI infrastructure provider. Under the five-year deal, IREN agreed to give Microsoft access to Nvidia GB300 systems, with Microsoft making a 20 percent upfront prepayment. The company said the contract was expected to contribute about $1.9 billion of annualized run-rate revenue once fully ramped.
To equip the contract, IREN simultaneously entered an agreement with Dell Technologies to purchase the GB300 GPUs and ancillary equipment, including servers, InfiniBand networking, cabling, software, and deployment services, for roughly $5.8 billion. The GPUs were to be deployed in phases through 2026 at IREN's 750 megawatt campus in Childress, Texas, inside a set of new liquid-cooled data centers branded Horizon 1 through Horizon 4 that together support about 200 megawatts of critical IT load. Microsoft framed the agreement as a way to add GPU capacity for Azure AI demand, much of which is driven by its partner OpenAI, at a time when accelerators were in short supply.
In May 2026, IREN announced a further set of agreements with Nvidia worth about $5.5 billion in combination. These included a separate five-year managed GPU cloud contract valued at roughly $3.4 billion, under which IREN provides Nvidia with cloud capacity for its own internal AI and research workloads using air-cooled Blackwell systems across about 60 megawatts at Childress, plus a warrant package valued at around $2.1 billion giving Nvidia the right to buy 30 million IREN shares at $70 each. IREN also gained Nvidia "Preferred Partner" status and described a pipeline of up to 5 gigawatts of Nvidia-aligned AI infrastructure across its sites.
| Counterparty | Announced | Value | Term | Scope |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Microsoft | November 2025 | ~$9.7 billion | 5 years | Nvidia GB300 AI cloud capacity at Childress (Horizon 1 to 4); ~$1.9B annualized revenue; 20% prepayment |
| Dell Technologies | November 2025 | ~$5.8 billion | n/a | Purchase of GB300 GPUs plus servers, InfiniBand, cabling and software for the Microsoft contract |
| Nvidia (cloud) | May 2026 | ~$3.4 billion | 5 years | Managed GPU cloud for Nvidia's internal workloads; air-cooled Blackwell, ~60 MW at Childress; ~$0.7B annualized revenue |
| Nvidia (warrant) | May 2026 | ~$2.1 billion | 5 years | Warrant for 30 million shares at $70; up to 5 GW of Nvidia-aligned infrastructure |
IREN's footprint splits between hydro-powered sites in British Columbia and much larger grid-connected campuses in Texas. The Childress campus in the Texas Panhandle is the centerpiece: a 750 megawatt, 576 acre freehold site connected to the ERCOT grid through IREN-owned substations. Childress hosts both legacy Bitcoin mining and the new Horizon AI buildings. Horizon 1, a 50 megawatt IT load (about 75 megawatts gross) direct-to-chip liquid-cooled hall built for roughly $300 million, was the company's first purpose-built AI data center and came online toward the end of 2025.
The larger expansion is the Sweetwater hub in West Texas, planned as a roughly 2 gigawatt campus across two sites about 28 miles apart. IREN said it energized the high-voltage substation at the 1.4 gigawatt Sweetwater 1 site, connecting it to the ERCOT grid, in an announcement in May 2026; the smaller 600 megawatt Sweetwater 2 site is targeted to follow around 2027 to 2028. Including Sweetwater, IREN has described about 2.75 gigawatts of fully contracted power in West Texas and a secured power portfolio of roughly 3 gigawatts in North America, within a stated ambition of building toward a multi-gigawatt global pipeline.
| Site | Location | Capacity | Power | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Canal Flats | British Columbia, Canada | 30 MW | Hydroelectric | First site, online 2019 |
| Mackenzie | British Columbia, Canada | 80 MW | Hydroelectric | Converting from ASIC mining to GPUs |
| Prince George | British Columbia, Canada | 50 MW | Hydroelectric | AI cloud, liquid-cooled GB300 installation |
| Childress | Texas, USA (ERCOT) | 750 MW | Grid | Bitcoin mining plus Horizon 1 to 4 AI halls (~200 MW IT) |
| Sweetwater 1 | West Texas, USA (ERCOT) | 1.4 GW | Grid | Substation energized 2026 |
| Sweetwater 2 | West Texas, USA (ERCOT) | 600 MW | Grid | Targeted ~2027 to 2028 |
IREN scaled its Nvidia fleet quickly through 2025 and into 2026, moving from a few thousand accelerators to more than 20,000 GPUs spanning Nvidia H100, H200, B200, B300, and GB300 NVL72 systems, alongside Nvidia Preferred Partner status. The company has guided toward roughly 150,000 GPUs and about 480 megawatts of AI capacity by the end of 2026, supported by purchase agreements for tens of thousands of additional B300 units to be deployed across its Texas and British Columbia sites. Newer GPU installations, including a liquid-cooled GB300 deployment at the Prince George site in British Columbia, use direct-to-chip liquid cooling rather than the air cooling used for the legacy mining fleet.
IREN's results capture a company in transition. For its fiscal first quarter ended September 30, 2025 (reported in November 2025), IREN posted record revenue of $240.3 million, up 355 percent year over year, almost all of it from Bitcoin mining ($232.9 million) with $7.3 million from AI cloud services. Reported net income of $384.6 million for that quarter was flattered by large non-cash gains tied to hedges on its convertible notes, so the headline profit overstated the underlying operating result.
Two quarters later the transition costs showed through. For the fiscal third quarter ended March 31, 2026 (reported May 7, 2026), revenue fell to $144.8 million as the company decommissioned mining hardware ahead of GPU installations and Bitcoin prices softened. Bitcoin mining revenue dropped to $111.2 million while AI cloud revenue roughly doubled sequentially to $33.6 million. IREN recorded a net loss of $247.8 million, driven by about $140.4 million of non-cash impairments on retired mining gear; adjusted EBITDA was $59.5 million. Management said it had about $3.1 billion of annualized recurring revenue under contract (roughly $1.9 billion from Microsoft, $0.7 billion from Nvidia, and $0.5 billion from the Prince George facility), and was targeting about $3.7 billion of annualized revenue by the end of 2026.
The market rewarded the AI pivot dramatically. IREN's market capitalization was about $19.4 billion as of June 5, 2026, with the shares around $54, after rising several-fold over the prior twelve months. The stock remains volatile, reflecting both the scale of its contracted AI revenue and execution risk on a multi-billion-dollar build-out funded partly with convertible debt.
IREN is the most prominent example of a wider shift in which listed Bitcoin miners have repurposed their power and land into AI data centers. Peers including Core Scientific, TeraWulf, Cipher Mining, Applied Digital, Galaxy Digital, Bit Digital, and Hive have all signed high-performance computing or AI hosting deals, competing with dedicated GPU clouds such as CoreWeave. The appeal is straightforward: with AI compute commanding far higher revenue per megawatt than mining, companies that already hold scarce grid interconnections and power contracts can convert that advantage into long-term contracted cash flows, though the conversion requires heavy capital spending and exposes them to GPU depreciation and customer concentration risk.