IREN, a former bitcoin miner, reports AI cloud revenue surged 687% year-over-year.
IREN spent years mining Bitcoin with cheap power and spare land. That same infrastructure is now pulling in AI customers like Microsoft and Nvidia, with results that reflect the shift.
IREN's AI cloud revenue reached $128.8 million in fiscal 2026, up from $16.4 million a year earlier—a 687% increase, according to the company's SEC-filed fiscal year results. More tellingly, fourth-quarter AI cloud revenue hit $70.5 million, for the first time surpassing Bitcoin mining revenue of $66.7 million. A company built for cryptocurrency mining now generates more revenue from renting GPUs than from mining coins.
The pivot comes at a steep cost. IREN finished fiscal 2026 with a net loss of $703 million as it scales its GPU cloud business from zero toward profitability. Yet the growth trajectory has attracted traders; shares traded between $41 and $44 in early October. The company has become one of the most closely watched names in AI infrastructure investment.
IREN's existing infrastructure was never designed for this purpose. The company's power contracts and land holdings in places like Childress, Texas, were built for Bitcoin mining on renewable energy and low-cost electricity. They happen to be exactly what AI compute requires: cheap, abundant power near available land, with grid interconnection already complete. Converting mining sites to GPU data centers remains a massive capital undertaking, but it bypasses years of permitting and power procurement that a company starting from zero would face.
That asset appeal explains Microsoft's commitment. IREN and Microsoft signed a five-year, $9.7 billion agreement for dedicated GPU infrastructure at IREN's Horizon facilities in Childress. Nvidia GB300 NVL72 systems are being installed across four planned data centers totaling approximately 200 megawatts. IREN has delivered Horizon 1, the first 50-megawatt phase, achieving Nvidia Exemplar Cloud status. Horizon 2 is currently being commissioned, with Horizons 3 and 4 targeted for the fourth quarter of 2026.
IREN's customer base extends beyond Microsoft to include Nvidia, Perplexity, Figure AI, Together AI, Fluidstack, Fireworks AI, Fal AI, and Hume AI, according to earnings disclosures. This customer spread—not a single anchor tenant propping up growth—lends credibility to the $4 billion-plus annualized run-rate target the company set this year.
Other Bitcoin miners pursuing the same transition have not yet reached IREN's inflection point. CleanSpark acquired 447 acres in Brazoria County, Texas, for an AI and HPC data center project scalable to 600 megawatts, and secured two $100 million credit facilities, but has reported no AI and HPC revenue to date. Core Scientific is further along, building 400 megawatts of AI-dedicated data center capacity, yet neither it nor CleanSpark has approached IREN's revenue growth. IREN has become the reference point for the "Bitcoin miner to AI cloud" thesis because Wall Street is no longer betting on the concept—it is reacting to a company already collecting revenue.
IREN co-CEO Daniel Roberts described the bottleneck plainly on a recent earnings call: "What we know today: demand for our capacity exceeds everything we can build, 85% of our $4bn+ 2026 target is signed, and there are thousands of people on our sites right now pouring concrete and racking GPUs." The company is not pitching a vision—it is describing a construction backlog it cannot clear fast enough.
Options markets have taken notice. Unusual call volume has surfaced repeatedly in IREN contracts through September and October, the positioning that emerges when traders perceive an inflection point. Whether that bet pays off depends on whether IREN can convert contracted capacity into delivered megawatts without losses outrunning growth. For now, the company that spent years mining Bitcoin has become the stock AI infrastructure investors cannot look away from.