IREN shares rose 19.6% on Monday, from Friday's close of $33.62 to $40.20, after the company signed $2.8bn in new AI cloud contracts and raised its year-end revenue target. The share price rise adds an estimated $120mn in paper value to the contested restricted stock unit package held by co-founders and co-chief executives William and Daniel Roberts.
IREN Rally Adds $120mn to Roberts Brothers' Disputed Pay Package
21 July 2026 - 13:35 CEST
By Stu Clelland
IREN began in 2018 as a Bitcoin mining firm built around cheap, renewable power, and has spent the past two years pivoting into AI cloud computing, renting out data centre capacity and GPUs to AI developers instead of only mining. The clearest sign of that shift came in November 2025, when a five-year, $9.7bn GPU deal with Microsoft sent shares up 20% in a single session, IREN's largest customer contract before Monday's announcement.
The brothers hold 9.1mn RSUs each, awarded in a package the company's own chair was still publicly defending less than two weeks ago after investor backlash and a share slide. The award vests in time-based tranches with no share-price hurdle, meaning its financial value moves directly with the stock even though its accounting cost was fixed at the grant date. Based on the combined 18.2mn RSUs and Monday's share-price move, the value of that stake rose by roughly $120mn in a single session, and by closer to $149mn including Tuesday's premarket gain to $41.80. Sandmark's calculation is independent of any figure published by the company.
Sandmark has asked IREN to confirm the current RSU count and for further comment, and will update this article if a response is received.
New AI contracts drove Monday's share move
IREN raised its year-end annualised run-rate revenue (ARR) target from $3.7bn to more than $4bn, with about 85% of that figure now under contract following new multi-year cloud services agreements worth $2.8bn. The deals bring IREN's customer roster to include Microsoft, NVIDIA, Perplexity, Figure AI, Together AI, Fluidstack, Fireworks AI, Fal AI and Hume AI, alongside one unnamed "new leading AI developer." The contracts carry a weighted average term of about four years and include customer prepayments covering roughly 45% of associated GPU capital expenditure.
Pay package built for exactly this swing
The board's own defence of the package, issued 9 Jul, argued that time-based vesting "better preserves alignment" than the share-price hurdles used in a prior award, some of which had vested early after an unrelated rally. Monday's move illustrates the same dynamic in reverse: a single piece of contract news, unconnected to the pay structure itself, moved tens of millions of dollars in value for two executives whose compensation had been the subject of shareholder anger days earlier.
Cash, revenue figures carry caveats
IREN said it held approximately $7.6bn in cash and cash equivalents as of 30 Jun, though the figure includes $1.7bn of restricted cash tied to GPU financing for the Microsoft contract at Horizon 1-4. The company's own notes caution that the $4bn+ ARR target depends on assumptions about GPU models, contracting, utilization and pricing, and remains subject to the commissioning and customer acceptance of GPU capacity in the months following each data centre's delivery.
