Key points
- Duquesne's June 30 13F shows a first-time IREN stake: 87,100 shares worth $4.0M, about 0.08% of its $5.2B book.
- 726 funds reported IREN for Q2. Bridgewater cut its stake 96% and D.E. Shaw 94%, while Aschenbrenner's fund kept $433M.
- IREN's board granted its co-CEOs 18.2M RSUs, about $788M at the grant price and 5.1% of shares, with no performance conditions.
- Share count went from 55.0M in FY2022 to 357.4M by April 2026.
Duquesne Family Office, which manages Stanley Druckenmiller's money, opened a position in IREN (IREN) during the quarter ended June 30. Its quarterly report, filed with the SEC on Friday, shows 87,100 shares valued at $3.98 million. The fund had reported no IREN holdings in either March or December.
The size is what matters. That same filing lists 95 positions worth $5.21 billion, which makes IREN 0.08% of the book. One of the greatest investors ever did buy IREN, and he sized it like a lottery ticket.
A 13F is a snapshot of the quarter's last day. Six weeks have passed since June 30, and the filing stops there.
One buyer only tells you so much, so we pulled the June 30 reports for the funds we track and compared them against March 31. IREN appears in 726 quarterly 13F filings made since July. The traffic ran in both directions, and the sellers were bigger names than the buyers.
| Fund | March 31 shares | June 30 shares | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Situational Awareness LP | 11,698,835 | 9,474,099 | -19% |
| Two Sigma | 2,864,882 | 2,613,062 | -9% |
| Millennium | 1,312,381 | 797,432 | -39% |
| Bridgewater | 720,925 | 26,595 | -96% |
| D.E. Shaw | 6,433,607 | 354,696 | -94% |
| Alkeon Capital | 500,000 | 550,000 | +10% |
| Hound Partners | 0 | 815,000 | new |
| Duquesne Family Office | 0 | 87,100 | new |
The biggest holder on that list is Leopold Aschenbrenner's Situational Awareness, which trimmed a fifth of its stake and still held $433 million of IREN on June 30, the position we flagged when his long book first became public. We left Citadel and Point72 out of the table because their filings mix in market-making and options paper that muddies any directional read, a problem we broke down when Citadel's report landed.
The bull case these funds are buying is simple. IREN signed a $9.7 billion five-year AI cloud contract with Microsoft (MSFT) on November 3. On Thursday the company said Microsoft formally accepted delivery of Horizon 1, the first 50 megawatts at its Childress, Texas campus, which starts the billing clock. NVIDIA (NVDA) granted it Exemplar Cloud status on the GB300 fleet the same day. IREN also has a $5.8 billion order with Dell (DELL) for the GPUs and gear that fill the halls. The board says market cap went from under $4 billion to over $16 billion in the fiscal year. Cramer's IREN call has aged well so far.
The share count is the tax on that story
IREN pays for growth with new shares, and it has never pretended otherwise. The count below comes from the cover pages of its own annual and quarterly reports.
| Date | Shares outstanding |
|---|---|
| FY2022 annual report | 54,982,916 |
| FY2023 annual report | 66,701,526 |
| FY2024 annual report | 187,864,454 |
| FY2025 annual report | 271,980,494 |
| April 30, 2026 | 357,378,674 |
That's 6.5 times the shares in under four years, and 26% growth in the six months through April alone. The machine hasn't slowed. IREN bought Mirantis, a software company, in an all-stock deal signed May 4, and on August 4 it registered those shares for resale so the sellers can cash out.
Then there's the pay package
On June 30 the board granted co-CEOs Daniel Roberts and William Roberts 9,099,328 restricted stock units each, per the 8-K. Combined that's 18.2 million shares, about $788 million at the grant price and 5.1% of the company. The units vest on time alone, in equal annual chunks over four years, with a two-year hold after each. The board's own filing says it "considered a range of alternative structures, including different grant sizes, performance-based and hybrid structures" and picked the one with no performance hurdle.
Short seller Jim Chanos did the math the day it landed, per Benzinga, calling the grant "17% of the estimated cumulative Adjusted Net Income of $4.7B over the term of the grant." One shareholder called the package "egregious" in Capital Brief's reporting. The stock dropped 12% on July 2 as the news landed in a broader Nasdaq selloff.
The board answered the critics directly in a letter to shareholders filed July 9. The independent directors wrote that the biggest risk to the company was "the risk of losing either or both of the Founder-CEOs who built this business," and that the brothers "only hold a modest ownership position for founders at this stage of a company's growth." A special shareholder meeting on the package is coming. As of Friday the company hadn't filed a proxy with a date.
This company also traded under another name, Iris Energy, and in November 2022 it let two of its subsidiaries default on about $103 million in equipment loans, handing back the Bitcoin miners while the parent kept its cash. It was all legal. Know the history before you copy the trade.
So yes, Druckenmiller bought IREN, and several of the biggest funds in the trade quietly headed the other way. The next hard date is FY26 results on August 27, with the pay-package proxy still to come.
Sources
- Duquesne Family Office LLC, Form 13F-HR for June 30, 2026, filed August 14, 2026 (SEC EDGAR)
- IREN Limited Form 8-K, July 1, 2026 (co-CEO RSU grants) and DEFA14A, July 9, 2026 (board letter)
- IREN annual reports FY2022 to FY2025 and Form 10-Q for March 31, 2026 (share counts)
- IREN press release, August 13, 2026 (Horizon 1 acceptance, NVIDIA Exemplar Cloud status)
- Benzinga, July 1, 2026 (Jim Chanos X post on the grant)
