Key points
- IREN (IREN) signed $2.8B in new AI cloud contracts, raised its 2026 revenue target to over $4B, and closed up 19.6% at $40.20.
- Customers are prepaying about 45% of IREN's GPU costs, real evidence of how scarce compute has gotten.
- IREN's next catalyst: Anthropic's $15B Australia data center tender, a decision due within weeks.
IREN Limited (IREN) announced $2.8 billion in new customer contracts for its AI cloud business on Monday morning and raised its year-end annualized revenue run-rate target from $3.7 billion to more than $4 billion. About 85 percent of that target is now under signed contract. The customer list includes Microsoft (MSFT), NVIDIA (NVDA) and a group of AI developers such as Perplexity, Together AI and Figure AI.
Co-CEO Daniel Roberts said the company has grown from about 3MW of self-built AI Cloud capacity a year ago to 480MW being delivered this year, "with 1.2GW targeted for 2027."
The stock closed up 19.6 percent at $40.20, a market value of about $14.4 billion. It had fallen in 19 of its prior 22 trading days before Freedom Capital upgraded it to Buy with a $58 price target the same day. The rest of the former bitcoin miner group read IREN's contracts as a signal for the whole trade, and two names had news of their own layered on top. Hut 8 (HUT) gained 10.6 percent after signing a second $9.8 billion, 15-year lease at its Beacon Point campus in Texas, taking that single site's total contract value to $19.6 billion. CleanSpark (CLSK) rose 10.7 percent on its own roughly $6.6 billion, 20-year data center lease in Sandersville. Soluna Holdings (SLNH) gained 20.4 percent, Cipher Digital (CIFR) 17 percent, and Keel Infrastructure (KEEL), the AI-pivot continuation of Bitfarms, 9.9 percent, without company-specific news of their own. Tellingly, the pure AI cloud names did not follow. Nebius (NBIS) rose a modest 2.8 percent, and CoreWeave (CRWV) closed flat. SharonAI (SHAZ) fell 2 percent. That is a good sign for IREN. The market was pricing in its own news, not a sector-wide wave.
The demand side showed up in public
The backdrop is what gave Monday its fuel. As we covered in this week's market preview, Moonshot AI stopped taking new Kimi K3 subscriptions on July 19, three days after launch, because demand ran into the ceiling of its GPU capacity. "Kimi K3 has received far more love than we expected, and our GPUs are feeling it," the company posted on X. An AI lab with a hot new model is turning away money because it cannot get enough chips to serve the people already paying it.
Then Alibaba (BABA) unveiled a preview of Qwen 3.8 Max over the weekend, a 2.4 trillion parameter model it claims performs just behind Anthropic's newest frontier model. Its shares climbed about 5 percent in Hong Kong. That makes two major model launches out of China inside a week. Both are chasing users, and every user request has to run on a GPU somewhere.
Remember, when Kimi K3 launched last week, the first reaction was a selloff in chip and memory names on the idea that a cheap, efficient model means less hardware spending. We argued the opposite, that cheap models create more usage, not less. Moonshot running out of GPUs within 72 hours is that argument playing out in real time, and Monday's buyers in the data center names read it the same way.
The detail that matters: customers are paying up front
Buried in IREN's release is the strongest evidence of scarcity. Recent contracts came with customer prepayments covering roughly 45 percent of the GPU spending tied to them, on deals averaging about four years. Customers do not hand over nearly half the cost of hardware in advance when they have other options. They do it when compute is scarce and they want their place in line.
IREN's next catalyst could be even bigger
There is a specific reason to think Monday's contracts are not the last big news IREN gets this quarter. As we reported in early July, a confidential tender document says Anthropic is weighing roughly $15 billion to lock up 1.4 gigawatts of data center capacity in Australia, with about 1 gigawatt targeted online by the end of 2027. A final investment decision was described in early July as about six weeks out, and the build could be split across four or five contracts. Anthropic has not named a partner, but IREN, as one of Australia's largest AI data center operators, is the logical name to watch if the tender advances. We sized up the field, including SharonAI (SHAZ), in that piece.
The catch
Before anyone chases this group up 20 percent, keep three things straight.
First, signed contracts are not revenue. As we laid out in our breakdown of how far each ex-miner has actually gotten, several names in this group carry billions in announced leases that have not started billing. IREN's prepayments reduce that risk, but the capacity still has to get built on schedule.
Second, these stocks have a habit of giving back one-day spikes. TeraWulf (WULF) spiked as much as 18 percent intraday on its Anthropic lease news, but had already given most of that back by the same day's close, up just 4.86 percent, then fell another 8 percent the next day.
Third, buildouts cost money, and this group has historically raised it by selling shares. A rising stock price makes that easier, and companies use it.
Our read: the demand signal is real, and Moonshot turning away paying subscribers is about as clean a proof point as this trade has gotten. But Monday's move already priced a lot of it, and the gap between the names with signed hyperscaler contracts and the names that simply own transformers is wide. The full SEC filing history for IREN is at IREN's filings page.
