Microsoft inks $9.7B deal with Australia’s IREN for AI cloud capacity

Microsoft is leaving no stone unturned in its quest to secure more computing power to meet its customers’ heavy demand for AI services.

On Monday, the Redmond-based tech giant signed a $9.7 billion, five-year deal with Australia’s IREN to secure more AI cloud capabilities. The deal will give Microsoft access to compute infrastructure built with Nvidia’s GB300 GPUs, which will be phased out by 2026 at IREN’s facility in Childress, Texas, planned to support 750 MW of capacity.

IREN said it is buying GPUs and equipment separately from Dell for about $5.8 billion.

The deal comes after Microsoft launched it last month First production cluster with Nvidia’s GB300 NVL72 system for AzureWhich, the company says, is optimized for logic models, agentic AI systems and multi-model generative AI.

Last month Microsoft Signed an agreement with Nscale About 200,000 Nvidia GB300 GPUs in three data centers in Europe and one in the US

Like competitors like CoreWeave, IREN started out as a Bitcoin-mining operation, but quickly realized that its vast collection of GPUs was better used for AI workloads. The company benefited greatly from the change in focus. Company CEO Daniel Roberts expects the Microsoft deal to take up just 10% of the company’s total capacity and generate annual revenue of about $1.94 billion, according to Bloomberg. Report.