NEW YORK, June 4, 2026, 07:04 (EDT)
IREN Ltd. (NASDAQ:IREN) shares pointed lower in premarket U.S. trading on Thursday, after the AI cloud and bitcoin mining company said it’s building an 800-megawatt campus in South Australia, its first data center in Australia. The stock finished Wednesday at $65.48, down 1.7%. In early morning trading at 6:48 a.m. Eastern, MarketBeat showed shares at $61.66, down 5.8% more.
Timing is key here. IREN’s stock has been trading more like a rare-power AI infrastructure play than a straight bitcoin miner, and now the company is asking investors to buy into a wider footprint spanning North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific. Shares stayed up over 73% in 2026 after Wednesday’s announcement, according to Investor’s Business Daily.
IREN said it has signed a transmission connection deal for a planned campus at Bundey, about 78 miles northeast of Adelaide. The agreement covers four 330-kilovolt feeder exits at a utility substation, which the company says can support as much as 800 MW with no extra network work. MW stands for megawatt, a unit of power. IREN is aiming to start energization from 2028. Plans also include submarine fiber connections to Singapore, Indonesia, South Korea, and Japan. “South Australia offers abundant clean energy and connectivity to serve APAC demand,” Co-CEO Daniel Roberts said.
The pitch: AI cloud services are about letting customers rent remote access to GPUs—the chips behind AI training and inference. IREN is wagering that buyers care about speed, power delivery, and control, not just getting their hands on more chips.
IREN is shifting its balance sheet with its strategy. The company announced Monday it has secured a $3.65 billion investment-grade GPU financing facility. The new debt backs the buildout for its Microsoft contract, and, after factoring in customer prepayments, covers about 96% of the planned $5.81 billion GPU capital spending. “The financing lowers our cost of capital,” Roberts said as IREN ramps up.
Microsoft is leading here. Reuters said in November that Microsoft signed a $9.7 billion, five-year agreement with IREN to use Nvidia chips at IREN’s Childress, Texas site. That helps Microsoft boost its compute capacity without building more of its own data centers or finding extra power. Reuters also reported the deal could end if IREN fails to meet delivery deadlines.
The Nvidia part of the story is more recent. Back in May, IREN said it had agreed to a five-year deal worth $3.4 billion with Nvidia for AI cloud services. Blackwell hardware will run inside roughly 60 MW of IREN’s data halls in Childress to deliver on that contract. The partnership also included Nvidia getting a five-year option to buy up to 30 million shares of IREN at $70, for a possible $2.1 billion stake if the agreement plays out.
Dell was next. IREN is set to buy Nvidia air-cooled Blackwell systems from Dell in a deal worth about $1.6 billion. The equipment should be ready by early 2027. Annualized run-rate revenue could climb to $4.4 billion from $3.7 billion, based on the pace of contracted or expected business. “Time-to-compute is everything,” Roberts told Reuters. Reuters
IREN’s transition still looks rough. For its fiscal third quarter, revenue came in at $144.8 million, down from $184.7 million last quarter. Net loss was $247.8 million. The company blamed weaker average bitcoin prices and decommissioned mining rigs before new GPUs. AI cloud revenue was higher and helped offset the decline. “The world is structurally short compute,” Roberts said.
Analyst calls are following the move, but direction is mixed. Canaccord bumped its target on IREN up to $79 from $70 and kept its buy, according to Investing.com. MarketBeat’s consensus comes in a bit higher at $80.69, based on 13 buys, five holds, and one sell.
Bernstein lifted its price targets for Riot Platforms and Core Scientific to reflect new AI infrastructure bets, but trimmed its target on MARA, IBD said. The broker’s mixed call lands as Bitcoin hovered at $62,487, down 7% and still a driver for IREN’s original mining business. The Nasdaq Composite lost 0.89% Wednesday as stocks pulled back from recent records.
But there are still clear risks. The Australia buildout faces pending approvals, grid upgrades, buying equipment and getting the job done. IREN warns about permitting, grid hookups, power supply, hardware sourcing, concentrated customers and electricity costs. Delays in rolling out GPUs, softer AI pricing, tighter financing or weak bitcoin could shift the stock away from an AI infrastructure story to trading more like a debt-heavy project operator.
