The AI infrastructure provider is easing anxiety over high data-center build-out costs as it secures new customers and prepayments for chips

Customer prepayments are covering roughly 45% of Iren's GPU capital expenditures.

Iren's stock was soaring 16% on Monday after the AI infrastructure provider hiked its 2026 revenue targets, proving to investors that data-center demand is still red-hot.

Iren $(IREN)$ has signed $2.8 billion in new multiyear cloud-service contracts with multiple top artificial-intelligence developers, the company announced in a Monday press release. As a result, the company has raised its year-end annualized run-rate revenue target for AI cloud business to $4 billion, up from $3.7 billion previously.

Companies such as Nvidia (NVDA), Microsoft $(MSFT)$, Perplexity and an unnamed "new leading AI developer" are utilizing Iren's services across both bare metal and managed cloud, the company said.

Key anchor customers like Nvidia and Microsoft have given Iren's business model credibility. Iren first entered into a five-year agreement with Microsoft in November 2025. As the company's first hyperscaler customer, Microsoft was a "game-changer" for Iren, Cantor Fitzgerald analyst Brett Knoblauch wrote at the time.

Several neoclouds have seen their shares come under pressure in recent weeks following reports that Meta Platforms (META) plans to expand into providing cloud services. Some investors worry this could be a sign that neoclouds are a stopgap measure until the hyperscalers' own data centers come online, in which case neoclouds may be overinvesting.

Shares of Iren also sold off earlier this month following the announcement of a new multiyear retention equity package for co-founders and co-CEOs Daniel Roberts and Will Roberts. Investors were concerned that the package, which gave the co-founders an aggregate stake of 6% in the company, would dilute their ownership. Shares of Iren have fallen 31% in the past month.

Monday's announcement helped ease some concerns about the high costs of building data centers. Iren said in the press release that customer prepayments made up approximately 45% of the capital expenditures associated with graphic processing units, "reducing Iren's net funding requirement for those deployments." The contracts have a weighted average term of roughly four years.

The company said on its earnings call in May that approximately 95% of Microsoft's GPU-related capex will be funded through prepayments and GPU financing.

As of June 30, 2026, Iren had roughly $7.6 billion in cash and cash equivalents, a sign that the company has plenty of resources to continue its build-out.

According to co-CEO Daniel Roberts, Iren's data-center footprint has scaled from 3 megawatts of self-built AI cloud capacity to 480 megawatts delivered this year. The company plans to grow capacity to 1.2 gigawatts by 2027.

-Christine Ji

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July 20, 2026 12:15 ET (16:15 GMT)

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