Microsoft inks $9.7bil deal with Australia’s IREN for AI cloud capacity
Microsoft is leaving no stone unturned in its quest for more computing capacity to meet its customers’ high demand for AI services.
On Monday, the Redmond-based tech giant signed a five-year, $9.7 billion contract with Australia’s IREN to secure further AI cloud capacity. The deal gives Microsoft access to computing infrastructure built with Nvidia’s GB300 GPUs, which will be deployed in phases through 2026 at the IREN facility in Childress, Texas, which is expected to support a capacity of 750 megawatts.
IREN said it is separately purchasing GPUs and equipment from Dell for about $5.8 billion.
The deal comes after Microsoft launched it last month first production cluster with Nvidia’s GB300 NVL72 systems for Azurewhich, the company says, are optimized for reasoning models, agentic AI systems and multimodal generative AI.
Last month, Microsoft signed a deal with Nscale for approximately 200,000 Nvidia GB300 GPUs for three data centers in Europe and one in the US.
Like competitors like CoreWeave, IREN started as a bitcoin mining operation, but quickly realized that its vast collection of GPUs could be better used for AI workloads. The company has benefited enormously from the shift in focus. The company’s CEO, Daniel Roberts, expects the Microsoft deal to take just 10% of the company’s total capacity and generate about $1.94 billion in annualized revenue, Bloomberg reported.
