IREN Shares Jump 16% as Bitcoin Mining Retreat Fuels AI Expansion

IREN stock jumped 16% Friday morning as investors cheered the company’s accelerating AI expansion, which now includes decommissioning Bitcoin mining hardware and selling off thousands of ASIC miners.

The Australia-founded company said in its quarterly filing that it recorded a $140.4 million non-cash impairment charge tied to Bitcoin miners and electrical equipment displaced as infrastructure was repurposed for AI cloud services.

As of March 31, IREN had also classified about 5,800 Bitmain S21 Pro miners as “held for sale,” recognizing an additional $2 million loss to mark the machines down to estimated sale value.

The disclosure offers the latest looks into how major publicly traded Bitcoin miners are actively dismantling portions of their mining fleet to free up power and infrastructure capacity for AI workloads.

IREN executives framed the shift as part of a broader transformation into a vertically integrated AI infrastructure provider during the company’s fiscal third-quarter earnings call on Thursday, where management highlighted new agreements with both Microsoft and NVIDIA alongside an expanding global power pipeline.

“We are strategically reallocating infrastructure from Bitcoin mining to AI Cloud,” executives said on the call, adding that the market for AI compute remains supply-constrained with “virtually no idle GPUs.”

Bitcoin mining revenue fell to $111.2 million during the quarter, pressured by lower Bitcoin prices and hardware decommissioning, while AI cloud services revenue climbed to $33.6 million.

The company has increasingly positioned its Childress, Texas campus as an AI compute hub. On May 7, IREN announced a five-year AI cloud services agreement with NVIDIA worth about $3.4 billion through 2032 to support the chipmaker’s internal AI and research workloads using Blackwell GPU systems deployed across 60 megawatts of capacity.

That deal came alongside a broader strategic partnership under which NVIDIA agreed to invest as much as $2.1 billion into IREN through share purchase rights tied to GPU deployment milestones. The companies said they are targeting up to 5 gigawatts of NVIDIA HGX-aligned AI infrastructure globally.

IREN is also working toward a previously disclosed $9.7 billion agreement with Microsoft to provide dedicated GPU cloud services over five years. To support those deployments, the company signed agreements in March to purchase about $3.5 billion worth of GPUs and related equipment from Dell.

Management said IREN aims to scale to 480 megawatts of AI cloud capacity, 150,000 GPUs and $3.7 billion in annual recurring revenue by the end of 2026, with further expansion planned through its Sweetwater and Childress campuses in Texas.

The company said it now controls 5 gigawatts of secured power capacity globally, including expansion efforts in Europe and Asia-Pacific. Earlier this week, IREN agreed to acquire Spanish data center developer Nostrum Group for about €165 million, adding roughly 490 megawatts of European capacity. It also announced the acquisition of cloud infrastructure software company Mirantis for approximately $625 million in stock.

To help fund the buildout, IREN raised capital extensively during the quarter. The company filed a new $6 billion at-the-market equity program in March and raised about $380 million from share sales during the quarter. It also secured a $3.6 billion delayed-draw financing commitment led by Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan tied to the Microsoft deployment.

IREN ended the quarter with approximately $2.6 billion in cash and reiterated that it continues to sell all mined Bitcoin daily, holding no Bitcoin on its balance sheet as of March 31.