Key Points
The contract is worth nearly $10 billion in total.
This was the first of four stages.
Iren (NASDAQ: IREN), one of a clutch of cryptocurrency miners attempting to lean more heavily on data center operations, was a stock market winner on Thursday. The company reported news that indicated the strategy is a viable one, and investors rewarded the stock by pushing it almost 3% higher that trading session. This compared favorably to the S&P 500 index's 0.7% gain.
New AI deployment
That morning, Iren announced that it had delivered a chunk of artificial intelligence (AI) compute to Microsoft. Horizon 1, a 50-megawatt deployment at Iren's campus in Childress, Texas, is the first stage of a five-year cloud services contract between the two companies worth $9.7 billion. It consists of four stages.
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Iren added that Nvidia had bestowed its Exemplar Cloud status on the deployed system architecture, the Nvidia GB300 NVL72. This matters because it certifies the quality of the deployment by the company that manufactured the hardware.
Investors were also cheered by Iren maintaining its goal of reaching 480 megawatts of gross AI cloud capacity in 2026, and 1.2 gigawatts next year.
A success to repeat
Nearly every major crypto miner is talking the talk about its pivot into data center operations these days. So when one of them walks the walk, investors rightfully take notice and act accordingly. It's a case of "so far, so good" for Iren; hopefully, for the company and its investors, future deployments go as smoothly as this one seems to be.
Eric Volkman has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Microsoft and Nvidia. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.