IREN has morphed from a near-busted Bitcoin miner into a cash-heavy AI infrastructure story, with $9.7 billion from MSFT, $3.4 billion from NVDA, and more than $4 billion of contracted annualized revenue tied to capacity that uses less than 10% of its >5 GW secured grid. The core thesis is that the scarce asset is power-plus-permits, not GPUs, and IREN is monetizing that scarcity at $20 million-plus per megawatt on new three-year deals versus about $2 million per megawatt for landlord-style contracts. The stock’s rerating case rests on Horizon 1-4 in Childress, TX, the Sweetwater hub, and a growing customer list that already includes Perplexity, Figure AI, FAL, Together AI, Fireworks, and an unnamed frontier lab. The risk is execution through the Bitcoin decommissioning and the current revenue dip, but the notes frame that dip as transitional, not structural.
IREN traded at $1 in Dec. 2022 after creditors crowded in and short sellers called for bankruptcy; by late Dec. 2022 it had fallen 96% to $16 while lenders claimed more than $150 million on its mining machines.
The company started as Iris Energy in 2018 in Sydney, founded by Daniel Roberts and Will Roberts, both from Mackery and both from wind and solar project development.
After listing on NASDAQ in 2021, IREN shifted from Bitcoin mining with cheap renewable power to renting NVDA GPUs in 2023, and by 2025 the GPU business became the main event.
IREN now owns the full stack — land, power, substations, buildings, cooling, GPUs, and Morantis software after an acquisition earlier this year — while most of the industry rents at least one layer from someone else.
NVDA gave IREN Exemplar cloud status on its newest GB300 systems, and management says Bitcoin mining will be fully decommissioned by December, turning the business into a pure AI play.
On the last earnings call, Daniel Roberts said weekly token usage across the big language models rose about 17x in 8 months, while the bottleneck is physical grid access, land permits, substations, and transmission.
IREN has more than 5 GW of secured grid connections; the $4 billion of revenue already discussed uses less than a tenth of that capacity, and management says 2026 capacity is largely sold out.
The current model is far more profitable than landlord-style data-center leasing: about $2 million a year per MW for landlord deals versus $20 million-plus per MW on new three-year AI-cloud contracts, with the same MW generating 5x to 10x more revenue.
In November, IREN signed a 5-year, $9.7 billion Microsoft deal with 20% upfront payment; in May, NVDA signed a 5-year, $3.4 billion deal, and NVDA got warrants to buy up to 30 million shares at $70, a $2.1 billion check.
For the Microsoft build, IREN is putting NVDA GB300 chips into 200 MW of liquid-cooled data centers in Childress, TX, across Horizon 1-4; Horizon 1 was finished and accepted by Microsoft last month, with Horizon 2-4 targeted for December.
AI cloud revenue rose from $16 million in fiscal 2025 to $129 million in fiscal 2026, while the business ran at about half a billion of annualized revenue at the end of June and about $1 billion today.
Three-year contract pricing is up about 125% since November, new deals are above $20 million a year per MW, active talks are around $25 million, and the Microsoft price implies a little under $10 million per MW per year.
The business ran at about 87% gross margin before depreciation, implying roughly $17 million a year back on $29 million of hardware and about a 2-year payback on a 3-year contract.
Customer prepayments cover about half of GPU cost upfront, Blue Owl and PIMCO are named lenders, and on the Microsoft build prepayments plus a $3.6 billion investment-grade loan at 6% cover 96% of the GPUs.
The branding push includes a next-month Warriors jersey patch reportedly above $50 million a year, starting with the 2026-2027 season, plus Chase Center signage, Valkyries warm-ups, billboards, and the purchase of the Awaken ad agency in May.
JPM upgraded IREN from underweight to neutral to overweight on Monday and lifted its target from 46 to 65; Bernstein is at 100, the average analyst target is about 79, and the stock trades around $45 with a roughly $17 billion market cap.
The stock was cut in half on sector-wide rate-hike fears, IREN guided to $25 billion to $30 billion of capex in fiscal 2027, raised about $19 billion in the last 12 months with only about $3 billion of equity, and reported a $684 million loss last quarter including about $450 million of non-cash write-off on old mining machines.
The buildout still has major optionality: the 2 GW Sweetwater hub in Texas was included as base load in ERCOT’s batch zero process last week, the first substation is energized, IREN picked up 490 MW in Spain through the Nordstrom acquisition, and the plan is 0.3 GW of IT load online by year-end and 0.8 GW by end-2027.