Microsoft is leaving no stone unturned in its quest to secure more compute capacity for meeting its customers’ heavy demand for AI services. On Monday, the company signed a five-year contract with Australia’s IREN valued at nine point seven billion dollars to secure additional AI cloud capacity. This deal will grant Microsoft access to compute infrastructure built with Nvidia’s GB300 GPUs. The infrastructure will be deployed in phases through 2026 at IREN’s facility in Childress, Texas, which is planned to support 750 megawatts of capacity.
Separately, IREN stated it is purchasing GPUs and equipment from Dell for approximately five point eight billion dollars. This new agreement follows Microsoft’s launch last month of its first production cluster with Nvidia’s GB300 systems for Azure. The company said these systems are optimized for reasoning models, agentic AI systems, and multi-modal generative AI.
Last month, Microsoft also signed a deal for approximately 200,000 Nvidia GB300 GPUs to be deployed across three data centers in Europe and one in the United States. Similar to competitors such as CoreWeave, IREN began as a bitcoin-mining operation. The company quickly realized its large collection of GPUs could be better utilized for AI workloads and has benefited significantly from this shift in focus. According to reports, IREN’s CEO Daniel Roberts expects the Microsoft deal to use only ten percent of the company’s total capacity and generate about one point nine four billion dollars in annualized revenue.