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Bitcoin

Popular Bitcoin miner seeks $6 billion for AI expansion

Bitcoin miner IREN has contracts, land and power for its AI data center buildout. What it does not yet have is all the money. The company told investors on Nov. 5 that its remaining planned c

AnonymousCryptoCompass newsroom
November 6, 2026
5 min read
NEWS
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Bitcoin miner IREN has contracts, land and power for its AI data center buildout. What it does not yet have is all the money.

The company told investors on Nov. 5 that its remaining planned capital spending for fiscal 2027 is $15 billion. 

About $9 billion is covered by cash, committed GPU financing and customer prepayments, according to its latest results. The other $6 billion still has to be raised.

A $6 billion funding gap to close

IREN says the remaining $6 billion is expected to come from targeted GPU financing, customer prepayments, data center financing and other corporate-level sources. That funding is subject to market conditions.

The figure is planned future financing, not a current cash shortfall. Even the $9 billion already counted is not all cash on hand. It includes restricted cash, undrawn committed financing facilities and contracted prepayments customers have not yet paid.

The buildout is anchored by a $9.7 billion contract with Microsoft, signed in November 2025. Microsoft prepaid 20% of the five-year deal for access to NVIDIA GB300 GPUs.

Most of IREN's remaining fiscal 2027 spending is covered, but $6 billion still depends on markets. Source: IREN's Q1 FY27 results

IREN bought those GPUs and equipment from Dell for about $5.8 billion. They are being deployed in phases through 2026 at its 750-megawatt Childress, Texas campus, across four liquid-cooled data centers known as Horizon 1 to 4.

The first of them, Horizon 1, was delivered to and accepted by Microsoft in August. The site also earned NVIDIA's Exemplar Cloud status after NVIDIA tested its GB300 NVL72 systems there.

The playbook

To fund the Microsoft GPUs, IREN closed a $3.65 billion GPU financing in June. Fitch and DBRS rated the debt A and A(low), the highest publicly rated investment-grade GPU financing announced and the first of its kind in the U.S. private placement market.

Together with Microsoft's prepayment, the facility covers $5.59 billion, or about 96%, of the $5.81 billion Microsoft GPU bill at an average financing cost of 3.31%. The blended interest rate on the debt itself is 6%. Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan arranged the deal.

IREN also holds $6 billion of data center assets with 20-year useful lives that it says can be separately financed.

The committed money fully funds the 0.3-gigawatt program behind IREN's target of more than $4 billion in annualized run-rate revenue, subject to conditions on those financing facilities. ARR is an operating metric, not GAAP revenue, and recognized revenue may be materially lower.

That target has already slipped. IREN moved it from the end of 2026 to January 2027 after a customer-requested design change and supplier timing, and says it may extend to the end of February.

Operating ARR still doubled to $1 billion during the quarter, co-founder and co-CEO Daniel Roberts said.

Related: HIVE CEO says Bitcoin is becoming the ‘American electrodollar’

Contracts keep getting richer

After the quarter ended, IREN signed a five-year contract at about $22 million per megawatt, with the customer prepaying 90% of the associated GPU costs. It also signed a short-term contract at $40 million per megawatt and contracted H100 GPUs at double their previous pricing.

Contracted pricing rose 11% on three-year deals and 12% on five-year deals. IREN also expanded an existing contract with what it calls a leading frontier AI lab.

Revenue backlog rose 22% from the prior quarter to $20.3 billion. About two-thirds sits with investment-grade counterparties, across a customer list that includes NVIDIA, Microsoft and 13 others.

"We own the land, the power and the data centers under all of it, which gives us more ways to fund growth and lets us set its pace," Roberts said in the results release.

Losses narrow as AI revenue nearly triples

IREN reported $228 million in revenue for the quarter ended Sept. 30, up 66% from the prior quarter. AI Cloud revenue nearly tripled to $200 million at an 86% gross margin, while Bitcoin mining revenue fell to $28 million from $67 million.

The AI Cloud split shows where the business is going. Cloud services brought in $135 million and lease revenue added $65 million, after a prior quarter with no lease income at all.

The company posted a net loss of $263 million, narrower than the $684 million loss in the prior quarter. Adjusted EBITDA was $66 million.

What comes next

Horizon 2 through 4 are in late-stage construction at Childress. IREN is targeting 480 megawatts of gross AI Cloud capacity by the end of 2026 and 1.2 gigawatts in 2027.

Beyond Texas, the company is building liquid-cooled sites at its Sweetwater and Mackenzie campuses and secured a civil works license for a 300-megawatt development in Spain. It holds more than 30,000 acres of land with over 5 gigawatts of secured power.

Its wider development pipeline tops 35 gigawatts, though IREN cautions it does not expect a significant portion of those projects to become secured power.