IREN just turned $2.8 billion in fresh AI cloud contracts into a raised revenue target, and Microsoft and Nvidia are now paying customers of a company that used to just mine bitcoin.
IREN has signed $2.8 billion in new multi-year AI cloud services contracts with Microsoft, Nvidia, Perplexity and Figure AI, the Sydney based company said this week. That pushed IREN to raise its year end 2026 AI cloud revenue target from $3.7 billion to more than $4 billion. Roughly 85 percent of that figure is already under contract, according to Investing.com. Shares jumped as much as 17 percent to $39.22 on the news, CryptoTimes reported, before settling into a range between roughly $34 and $37 by July 20.
That's a striking number. The company spent its first six years as a bitcoin miner. IREN started out as Iris Energy, founded by brothers Daniel and Will Roberts, who built data centers around cheap hydro and wind power in Childress, Texas and British Columbia, running mining rigs at low cost. In 2025 the company d further growth in its bitcoin hashrate and pointed its capital at high density AI data centers instead. It hasn't looked back since.
The Bigger Bet Behind the Deal #
The bigger deal sitting behind this one is a five year, $9.7 billion agreement IREN signed with Microsoft in November 2025. It delivers Nvidia GB300 GPUs out of IREN's 750 megawatt Childress campus. Co-CEO Daniel Roberts has said that contract alone should generate about $1.94 billion in annualized revenue once fully deployed. GB300 racks have already landed at Childress, with engineers running InfiniBand cabling as the buildout moves through four planned phases this year.
Every Bitcoin Miner Is Making the Same Move #
IREN isn't the only miner making this leap. Cipher Mining signed a 15 year, $5.5 billion lease for 300 megawatts of AI hosting capacity. TeraWulf's lease with Anthropic is projected to bring in nearly $19 billion in contractual revenue across 401 megawatts, Bitcoin Magazine reported. The pattern repeats everywhere. Miners already hold power contracts and land - plus the grid connections most AI companies would need years to secure on their own. GPUs need electricity more than they need a blockchain.
Frankly, the math is simple. Training and running frontier AI models burns through power faster than developers can build capacity. Nvidia can't ship enough chips to keep up either. A miner sitting on a Texas substation connection it already paid for years ago has exactly what Microsoft and Amazon are short of right now.
The CoreWeave Comparison #
IREN is increasingly measured against CoreWeave, the Nvidia backed GPU cloud operator that reported $2.078 billion in first quarter revenue and a $99.4 billion backlog in May 2026. CoreWeave built its business renting chips first and scaling infrastructure around demand. IREN's pitch runs the other way: it owned the substations and land before AI demand showed up. That's the difference. Customer prepayments now cover about 45 percent of the capital spending tied to its newest GPU deployments, doing some of the work a bank loan or share sale would otherwise have to do.
The company is targeting 480 megawatts of AI cloud capacity by the end of 2026, up from roughly 3 megawatts in 2025. By 2027 it wants 1.2 gigawatts. That's a fast scale up for any infrastructure company, let alone a former bitcoin miner. Bitcoin mining hasn't vanished from IREN's business. It's just not what investors are paying for.
The stock trades well above where it sat before the AI pivot began. Neocloud names including IREN, CoreWeave and Nebius have swung hard in both directions this year on any hint that a hyperscaler like Meta might build its own capacity instead of renting it. Whether IREN's valuation holds now depends on delivering the megawatts it has promised, on schedule - to customers with far more clout than a mid sized Australian miner. Microsoft and Nvidia don't sign multi-year contracts with companies they expect to miss deadlines. For now, IREN is the clearest evidence yet that a bitcoin rig and an AI server rack were always chasing the same thing: cheap power next to a substation.
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