IREN (IREN): From Green Bitcoin Mining to AI Computing

In the past few years, the most important computing hardware has been GPUs (Graphics Processing Units). They moved from niche hardware used for video games and graphic rendering to the most efficient tool for cryptocurrency mining, especially Bitcoin. This triggered a first wave of demand for GPUs, which boosted the position of the industry leader, Nvidia.

But this is the discovery that GPUs are the perfect tool for AI calculation as well, which changed everything. Not only did this make Nvidia the world’s most valuable company, but it also made any company with a good stash of GPUs highly valuable. As a result, many crypto mining companies did a partial or complete transformation into cloud AI computing providers.

A good example is CoreWeave, a Bitcoin mining operator that has successfully become a key AI cloud computing company by providing its expertise in running GPU-centric computations to both small and large AI companies.

(You can read more about CoreWeave in its own dedicated investment report.)

Another company with a similar profile is IREN, a Bitcoin mining operator transforming into an AI infrastructure stock, supported by significant GPU acquisitions and a $9.7B AI cloud deal with Microsoft (MSFT -1.37%).

Moving forward, IREN is planning to be both a major Bitcoin mining company, responsible for 5% of global hashrate, and a Cloud AI leader.

The company has an ambitious growth target, and might be a key provider of AI computing at a time when building more capacity is harder and slower than most experts in the industry expected, as IREN followed a strategy of securing energy supply in abundance ahead of time.

What is IREN? Company Profile

From Iris Energy to AI Infrastructure

IREN, previously named Iris Energy Limited, was founded by experienced money managers, the brothers Daniel and Will Roberts, one a vice president at Macquarie Group and the other co-owner of Palisade Investment Partners, a company with $6B in infrastructure assets under management.

The pair slowly became interested in crypto after dipping their toes in the crypto world for a few years, before deciding to go all in in 2018 with the foundation of Iris Energy. Today, both brother directly owns a little more than 5% of the company after many successive fundraising rounds.

A key idea behind the company was the issue of Bitcoin mining regarding energy consumption and sustainability. So they looked for places where green energy was abundant, or even in surplus to local demand and storage capacity.

They found in Canal Flats, British Columbia, Canada, that the shutdown of a paper pulp mill had drastically reduced energy consumption, despite a massive build-up of hydropower happening at the same time, creating both unused capacity and high electricity prices for the locals.

Some investors had already realized the opportunity and built a data center on that site, which the Roberts brothers bought.

“So we came in and said, ‘Right, we’ll use up this power. We’ll pay your market price for power and put downward pressure on power prices.”

Daniel Roberts – IREN Co-Founder

The venture has also re-dynamized a small rural community that has suffered from deindustrialization.

“They’ve proven themselves right from the get-go to be a very responsible corporate citizen, giving an annual community grant of $100,000 to not-for-profits. That kind of money goes a long way in a small community where people are struggling.

Joan Atkinson – Mackenzie mayor

The same method was applied to other regions. For example, Childress County in Texas had 32 GW (gigawatts) of wind and solar capacity, but just 12GW of the transmission line to export that power down to Dallas and Houston. Not only did this create plenty of cheap energy to use for Bitcoin mining, but at the time, IREN was even paid to consume energy.

“Last August (August 2023), our cost of production for mining Bitcoin was negative $28,000 a coin because we were paid to take the power, and then we sold those Bitcoin for another $28,000.”

Daniel Roberts – IREN Co-Founder

IREN was listed on the NASDAQ in November 2021, just at the time of an all-time high price for Bitcoin, before the subsequent crash.

Shortly after, it started to order even more GPUs to grab at the AI market. Its first deal was with Poolside AI, followed by others. With the largest companies in partnership with IREN today, including Microsoft, Together.ai, Fluidstack, and Fireworks AI.

However, the company is still also active in cryptos, which is a marked difference from other crypto miners that 100% rotated toward the AI market.

In January 2023, Iris Energy was renamed to IREN to reflect the company’s diversification beyond green-energy mined Bitcoins.

By the end of 2025, the company was still expanding quickly, with more than doubling GPU capacity and revenues, while quadrupling Bitcoin mining capacity and EBITDA. In February 2026, IREN was added to the MSCI USA Index, making it part of an important index used by many passive investors.

Source: IREN

IREN’s 100% Green Energy Strategy

At the core of the company is the belief that raw compute capacity and access to cheap energy are unique competitive advantages when brought together. And that what this computing is used for is not so important, with different markets and categories all requiring similar infrastructure, giving the company flexibility.

“We realized that the world was going to crave these power-dense data centres built deliberately for raw processing power. It was pretty clear that such data centres would have other uses. Was it AI, high-performance computing, data analytics, machine learning? All these applications didn’t need the bells and whistles of really low-latency, high-tech capital-city data centres that were very expensive. They just required raw power.”

Daniel Roberts – IREN Co-Founder

IREN today is powered 100% by renewable energy, active in 6 different locations, with 4,500 acres built.

Bitcoin Mining: 5% of Global Hashrate

On the Bitcoin mining capacity, the company today has 50EH/s of installed mining capacity. The company’s hashrate, measured in Exahash per second. represents a very significant portion of the world’s total hashrate, estimated to oscillate around 1,000 EH/s in March 2026, making it almost 5% of global capacity.

This activity already generates up to $1B in annual revenue, but further expansion of capacity beyond 52 EH/s has been paused for now to focus available cash and new hardware purchases on AI capacity.

The company’s cost structure is designed such that it hits a $0 EBITDA if Bitcoin prices crash to $45,000, $136M at $60,000 / Bitcoin, and $638M at $115,000 per Bitcoin.

AI Cloud: 150,000 NVIDIA GPUs

IREN is operating 810 MW of data center capacity in March 2026, with 4.5 GW of power secured ahead of the market for its upcoming expansion in the sector, of which 2.1 GW worth of data center capacity is already under construction.

A large part of this expansion is located in areas where the company already has a strong presence, notably British Columbia, Texas, and Oklahoma, with the power ramp-up toward 4.5 GW scheduled until the end of 2028, planned to hit 2.3 GW by mid-2026 and 2.9 MW in mid 2027.

Source: IREN

The company was already generating $250M from Cloud AI service by the end of 2025, and it seems to only be getting started. It already has $2.3B in contracted AI revenues in Q2 2026, with a large part coming from a recent Microsoft deal (see below).

The main hardware it will use for its Cloud AI will be the advanced GPUs NVIDIA Blackwell (most of the current installed hardware) and NVIDIA H100, H200, B200, B300, & GB300s.

In March 2026, it announced that it had entered into a purchase agreement for over 50,000 NVIDIA B300 GPUs that will expand its total fleet to 150,000 GPUs. To give a sense of scale, IREN in early 2026 “only” had installed  23,000 GPUs, so it is planning to almost 7x its capacity in a few years.

The installations in construction will mix air-cooled and liquid-cooled GPUs, as well as ASICs (Application-Specific Integrated Circuit), more efficient and powerful chips, but less flexible than GPUS, specialized in AI inference, for an optimized run and lower energy consumption.

Source: IREN

The company estimates it takes 2 years to get back its investment in GPU hardware, and 3 years when taking into account the supporting infrastructure like power supply, cooling, etc.

As the infrastructure is expected to be a lot more long-lived than GPUs, this means that IREN will sit on strong infrastructure to be upgraded with more advanced hardware in the future, at a lower cost, as the non-GPU will have been paid for already.

The $9.7B Microsoft & AI Partnership

By far, the largest and most high-profile deal for IREN so far has been the November 2025 announcement of a $9.7B deal with Microsoft, connected to another large $5.8B deal with Dell for the purchase of the required GPUs and ancillary equipment, with deployment of the NVIDIA GB300 GPU.

The 5-year deal with Microsoft includes a 20% prepayment credited to years 3-5 and covers an IT load of 200 MW. IREN will build and operate its own data centers, with construction in 4 phases starting immediately in 2026 (Horizon 1-4).

This agreement not only validates IREN’s position as a trusted provider of AI Cloud services but also opens access to a new customer segment among global hyperscalers.

It marks another major step forward for IREN as we continue to expand large-scale GPU deployments across our 3GW secured power portfolio in North America, reinforcing our position as a leading AI Cloud Service Provider.”

Daniel Roberts – Co-Founder & Co-CEO of IREN

As the Childress site has as much as 750MW of secured and available power supply, the site could be scaled up further in the future with an additional 450 MW of potential capacity (Horizon 5-10).

Source: IREN

 How IREN Finances GW-Scale Growth

In order to finance the ambitious expansion plans of the company, more money was required upfront. In December 2025, the company closed a $2.3B convertible notes offering, with seniority due for 2032 and 2033.

The company has also secured $3.6B in dedicated GPU financing from major banks, including Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase, with reported interest rates below 6%.

In addition, the company filed for a $6B ATM (At-The-Market) program in March 2026, allowing it to issue shares incrementally if market conditions are favorable, at management discretion.

Besides all of these fundraising methods, the company also leases most of its GPUs from the manufacturers, instead of outright purchase, which spreads out the cost over several years, reducing immediate cash requirements.

And of course, profits from Bitcoin mining help fund the expansion into AI, although the cryptocurrency prices have been volatile lately.

So overall, while extremely ambitious, the combination of a secured energy supply and these many funding sources makes the expansion plans of IREN into becoming a leading provider of AI compute seem realistic.

 IREN Outlook: Bitcoin vs. AI Growth

From its day as Iris Energy to today’s IREN’s turn to AI, the company has been built around the idea of providing cheap computing power, 100% backed by abundant green energy, making it one of the world’s leading Bitcoin miners by hashrate, and likely one with the lowest carbon footprint at this scale.

This is still true today, with the company having performed the remarkable feat of securing many GW of power in advance, while many other hyperscalers are scrambling to restart nuclear power plants, build solar + battery capacity, even considering going into space like Elon Musk and his newly merged xAI + SpaceX, or simply delaying the construction of their data centers.

Not only is this power supply available and secured, but it is also entirely carbon-free, based on hydro, wind, and solar, giving the company extra green credentials on top.

IREN is still true to its origin and continues mining Bitcoin, providing some funds to its expansion plans, although most is coming from new debt and equity, which are going to make it one of the leading providers of computing power for AI tasks, as illustrated by its recent almost 11-digit deal with Microsoft.

So IREN is a good stock for investors interested in getting exposure to the new digital economy, with both exposure to Bitcoin and AI hyperscalers.

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