Most companies don't borrow $3.6 billion to buy chips from one supplier for one customer. IREN just did, and the customer is Microsoft.
The Australian data center operator sold $2.1 billion of bonds in a private placement and lined up another $1.5 billion in project finance loans. All of it is heading to Nvidia.
The chips will land at IREN's Childress, Texas campus, where Microsoft has signed up for 200 megawatts of liquid-cooled AI capacity. That's enough power to run a small city, all going to one customer training AI models.
Microsoft isn't IREN's only big partner. The company also has a five-year, $3.4 billion AI cloud services contract with Nvidia itself, plus plans to deploy Nvidia's Blackwell systems across roughly 60 megawatts at the same Texas site.
As part of that deal, Nvidia got the right to buy up to 30 million IREN shares over five years.
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A few years ago, IREN was mostly known for bitcoin mining. Now it's the kind of company Microsoft and Nvidia both want to lean on for AI infrastructure.
The shift shows how much demand for AI computing has reshaped who builds and finances data centers. Hyperscalers - the cloud giants like Microsoft, Amazon, and Google - can't build fast enough on their own, so they're outsourcing capacity to specialized operators like IREN that can move quicker.
IREN stock is up about 50% year to date, and the company is leaning further into the trade. Future deployments are expected to focus on its 2-gigawatt Sweetwater campus in Texas, which Nvidia plans to use as a flagship site for its DSX reference design.
The size of this loan tells you something about lender appetite for AI infrastructure. Private debt markets have been jittery about software borrowers tied to AI replacement risk, but chip and data center deals are still getting funded at scale.
IREN's announced partnerships with Nvidia could support up to 5 gigawatts of capacity over time. For context, that's roughly the power draw of about 4 million US homes.
The next thing to watch is how fast IREN can actually bring all that capacity online.
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