Microsoft Corporation has signed a landmark agreement worth around $9.7 billion with Australian AI cloud provider IREN Limited, making Microsoft the company’s largest customer to date.
The five-year deal gives Microsoft access to Nvidia accelerator systems in Texas that are built using the GB300 architecture, specifically designed for artificial intelligence workloads. According to a company statement, the agreement includes a 20 per cent prepayment. IREN also confirmed it will purchase GPUs and related equipment worth $5.8 billion from Dell Technologies to support the project.
Once fully implemented, the partnership is expected to generate about $1.94 billion in annual revenue, IREN Chief Executive Officer Daniel Roberts said in an email statement. The deal will use around 10 per cent of IREN’s total capacity, leaving room for further partnerships and revenue growth.
“We’ve always viewed the major hyperscalers as natural partners,” Roberts said. “We’ve been in discussions with several of them, and those conversations have accelerated as both their compute requirements and our AI Cloud capabilities have grown.”
IREN is part of a new generation of data centre operators, known as “neoclouds,” which specialise in AI computing power. This group also includes companies like CoreWeave, Nebius Group, Crusoe, and Nscale, all of which compete to provide infrastructure for large hyperscalers such as Meta Platforms and AI companies like OpenAI. Many of these firms, including IREN, began as Bitcoin mining businesses before expanding into artificial intelligence infrastructure.
IREN’s shares, listed on NASDAQ, have already surged more than 500 per cent this year, driven by growing investor confidence in the AI cloud boom that has also helped make Nvidia a $5 trillion company.
Microsoft has been aggressively signing leasing contracts with such firms to expand its cloud resources, aiming to meet rising demand for AI-powered services and support clients like OpenAI. The company recently acknowledged facing challenges in securing enough cloud capacity to serve customers using its Azure platform.
In Texas, IREN’s GB300 systems will be installed in phases throughout next year at its Childress facility, which is planned to support 750 megawatts of capacity. The company also operates a 2-gigawatt site at its Sweetwater Hub near Abilene, where it continues to see “strong interest in large-scale AI infrastructure deployments,” Roberts said.
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