IREN Shares Whipsaw on New Contracts and Financing Announcements

The operator now counts 23,000 GPUs (graphics processing units) either already running or on delivery. It expects to make more than $500 million a year in revenue once that fleet is fully installed and rented, a target it expects to reach by Q1 2026. 

Of the total, it has contracts to rent out about 11,000 chips, which equates to roughly $225 million a year once those are live by the end of the year.

GPU front-runner

Nvidia’s Blackwell GPUs are widely seen as the industry front-runner for AI. Because these chips are costly and hard to come by, many AI firms rent compute by the hour from providers like IREN, which hosts the hardware in its own data centres rather than selling it.

Alongside AI, the company continues to run its Bitcoin-mining operations at existing sites, with 50 EH/s of installed capacity.

New contracts

According to the statement, the company “is actively engaging with existing and prospective customers through site tours, technical diligence and commercial negotiations.” New contracts are for an average of around two years, and at current pricing, IREN expects two years of revenue would roughly cover the hardware cost (before power, labour, and other operating expenses).

The operator now runs about 2,910 MW of secured power across sites in British Columbia – enough to supply over 2 million US households for a year if it ran non-stop – and is building new “Horizon 1 & 2” facilities in Childress, Texas, making room for more than 100,000 chips as it scales.

“Our ability to rapidly transition from ASICs to GPUs across our British Columbia campuses, and the speed at which we’re building Horizon 1 & 2, demonstrates how IREN is uniquely positioned to meet accelerating demand for AI compute,” said Co-Founder and Co-CEO Daniel Roberts.

Shares climb

Shares jumped about 5 percent within minutes of the contract announcement on Tuesday morning (UTC).

That evening, the company proposed a convertible note offering to help fund the expansion. The proposal aims to raise $875 million of convertible senior notes plus a $125 million option for the initial purchasers, for a potential total of $1 billion.

Since convertible debt can later turn into shares (diluting existing holders), some investors sold off their positions to avoid this expected dilution.

After-market slide

The stock slid about 7.3 percent in after-market trading on the financing announcement. Even so, IREN remains up a staggering 500 percent year-to-date, fuelled by the AI boom, which continues to shake business models around the world.