Getting your
Trinity Audioplayer ready...SAN FRANCISCO – The Warriors’ new jersey sponsor is a major force in the artificial intelligence race that has taken over the Bay Area.
At a corporate event at Chase Center on Thursday, Warriors owner Joe Lacob and star forward Jimmy Butler sat next to IREN founder Daniel Roberts as part of a panel discussion.
IREN was described as “vertically integrated AI Cloud provider, delivering GPU clusters for AI training and inference to customers in the Bay Area and around the world.”
Though terms of the deal were not made public, Sportico reported that the sponsorship is worth $50 million per year. In addition to the Warriors, the WNBA’s Valkyries and Santa Cruz Warriors will also have IREN patches on their jerseys.
Warriors owner Joe Lacob said the team, which continued its partnership with Rakuten but decided to change up its jersey sponsor, is all-in on embracing AI. He told the audience that the Warriors are incorporating AI into as many aspects of the organization as possible.
“I don’t know if you’ve heard, but (AI) is hot. they’re really an ideal partner for us,” Lacob said, adding about AI usage, “It’s clearly invasive, it’s everywhere, I don’t even think we know yet all the ways we’re going to use it.”
IREN, which is based in Australia, currently has built data centers in Canada, Texas and Oklahoma. In October, IREN announced a $9.7 billion contract with Microsoft to help the tech giant with AI cloud infrastructure.
Last month, IREN partnered with Santa Clara-based NVIDIA on another AI infrastructure program.
The negative environmental impact of such facilities has been hotly debated, with the data centers causing continuous noise and requiring large amounts of electricity and fresh water to maintain.
Roberts pivoted to the number of people the data centers employ and economic opportunities the facilities present when asked about the controversy surrounding data centers, and Warriors chief commercial officer Mike Kitts echoed those sentiments when asked after the presentation.
“It’s not only about the data center, but I think it’s about their approach, and when you take a community-first approach to any business, i think that’s where you start to say, ‘Do we see the world the same way, and do we have similar values,’” Kitts told the Bay Area News Group.
On Friday, the very next day, Warriors rookies Yaxel Lendeborg and Lajae Jones held up their new jerseys, and a bright green IREN patch was already stitched across the left side of both garments.