Key points
- IREN (IREN), formerly Iris Energy, signed a Warriors jersey patch worth more than $50 million a year.
- The former bitcoin miner has pivoted to AI, including a roughly $9.7 billion Microsoft GB300 deal.
- Other miners going AI include TeraWulf (WULF), Cipher Mining (CIFR), and Core Scientific (CORZ).
If you tune into a Golden State Warriors game next season, there is going to be a new four-letter word stitched onto the jersey, right where the Rakuten patch used to sit: IREN. On Wednesday the team announced a multi-year partnership that puts IREN's name on every Warriors jersey starting in 2026-27, and reports peg it at more than $50 million a year. That makes it, by most accounts, the richest jersey patch deal in the history of North American team sports.
Here is the twist that turns this from a sports story into a stock story: a few years ago IREN was a bitcoin miner. Now it is paying NBA money to park its logo next to Stephen Curry. So what actually happened, what does IREN even do, and how does it stack up against the dozen other crypto miners trying to pull off the same reinvention? Let's get into it.
The Golden State Warriors announced IREN as their new global jersey partner, with the IREN badge going on Warriors jerseys starting in the 2026-27 season.
See the Golden State Warriors' announcement on X
What the Warriors actually signed
This is bigger than just the patch. IREN (IREN) becomes a global partner across the entire Golden State organization: the Warriors, the WNBA's Golden State Valkyries, and the G League's Santa Cruz Warriors. The IREN badge goes on Warriors jerseys, its branding shows up on Valkyries warm-ups and Santa Cruz uniforms, and the logo gets prominent placement throughout Chase Center in San Francisco. It replaces Rakuten, which renewed a broader partnership with the team but handed off the jersey patch itself.
At north of $50 million a year over multiple years, both Sportico and Bloomberg framed it as the largest jersey sponsorship in North American team sports. For context, most NBA patch deals land somewhere in the $10 million to $20 million range. IREN paid up, and paid big. The obvious question is why a company most basketball fans have never heard of would write that check.
So who is IREN?
IREN started out in 2018 as Iris Energy, an Australian bitcoin miner founded by brothers Daniel and Will Roberts, and it still keeps a Sydney address. The original business was simple: plug cheap, mostly renewable power into warehouses full of machines that mine bitcoin. Then the AI boom hit, and IREN realized the thing it already owned, gigawatts of cheap power plus big buildings wired for heavy cooling, was exactly what AI companies were desperate to get their hands on. So it rebranded to IREN and started converting its sites into AI data centers.
The pivot got real in November 2025, when IREN signed a five-year, roughly $9.7 billion deal to rent Nvidia (NVDA) GB300 computing capacity to Microsoft (MSFT). To make that happen it agreed to buy about $5.8 billion of GPUs and gear from Dell (DELL) and build out liquid-cooled data centers at its 750-megawatt campus in Childress, Texas. It later tacked on a $3.4 billion AI cloud contract with Nvidia itself, and said it is buying enough chips to push its fleet toward 150,000 GPUs. The stock has climbed more than six-fold in 2026, and the company is now worth roughly $16.5 billion. That is the kind of balance sheet that can suddenly afford an NBA jersey.
The ultimate competitive advantage is built from the ground up. Thrilled to partner with the Golden State Warriors, and the full Golden State family, as we work together to shape what's next.
Why a bitcoin miner is buying NBA real estate
Spending $50 million a year on a jersey patch sounds nuts for an infrastructure company until you think about what IREN is actually buying. It is not chasing ticket sales. It is buying credibility. A few years ago its name was tied to crypto, a word that still makes a lot of enterprise customers and hyperscalers nervous. Putting your logo on one of the most valuable franchises in sports, in front of a global audience every night, is one of the fastest ways to tell the market that you are a serious, durable AI infrastructure company and not a crypto side bet. When you are trying to land multi-billion-dollar contracts with the likes of Microsoft, looking permanent matters.
It also fits a pattern we have written about before. The AI trade is really a fight over the unglamorous layers underneath the chatbots, and power is the one everyone underestimates. We mapped out where companies like this sit in our AI stock map, and we have covered why AI's power problem is the real bottleneck. Former miners already solved the hardest part of that puzzle, which is locking up cheap electricity and the land to use it.
How IREN compares to the other ex-miners
IREN is not alone, and this is the part worth understanding. A whole class of former bitcoin miners is racing to reinvent itself as AI infrastructure, and they are not all the same company with different tickers. Roughly speaking, they split into two camps. Some are becoming operators, running the GPUs themselves and selling AI cloud capacity. Others are becoming landlords, leasing their power and buildings to hyperscalers and AI clouds and collecting rent. Here is the field.
| Company | Where it is in the pivot | Notable AI / HPC deals |
|---|---|---|
| IREN (IREN) | Operator, running its own AI cloud | $9.7B five-year Microsoft deal, $3.4B Nvidia contract, fleet heading toward 150,000 GPUs |
| TeraWulf (WULF) | Landlord, the biggest contracted backlog | More than $12.8 billion in contracted HPC revenue, anchored by Google-backed Fluidstack and Core42 |
| Cipher Mining (CIFR) | Has exited most of its bitcoin mining | About $9.3 billion HPC backlog, including a 300MW AWS deal and a Google-backstopped lease |
| Applied Digital (APLD) | Landlord and colocation | Roughly $11 billion in contracted revenue from 15-year leases with CoreWeave for 400MW in North Dakota |
| Core Scientific (CORZ) | Shifting toward colocation hosting | Around 44% of Q4 2025 revenue already came from data center colocation |
| Hut 8 (HUT) | Pivoting, a market favorite | One of the best-performing miners of 2026, building out AI and HPC capacity |
| HIVE Digital (HIVE) | Early-stage operator | Its BUZZ HPC arm has roughly $35M in contracted annual recurring revenue and is targeting $200M and up |
| CleanSpark (CLSK) | Laggard, still essentially a pure miner | Still earns close to 100% of revenue from bitcoin; in talks with Meta to lease Georgia capacity, but no signed mega-deal yet |
A few things jump out. On raw contracted backlog, TeraWulf and Cipher have actually booked more future AI revenue than IREN has, and Applied Digital is not far behind. What IREN has that they mostly do not is the operator model plus brand-name customers in Microsoft and Nvidia, which is exactly what it is showing off with the Warriors deal. At the other end, CleanSpark is the cautionary tale: management keeps talking about an AI pivot, including reported discussions with Meta, but until a real lease is signed the market is still treating it as a bitcoin miner that is just along for the ride. You can track any of these names through their SEC filings on our site.
One quick fact-check, because these names get lumped together carelessly: Nebius (NBIS) and CoreWeave (CRWV) get mentioned in the same breath as IREN, and they do compete for the same AI customers. But neither was ever a bitcoin miner. Nebius is the international spinoff of Russia's Yandex, and CoreWeave came out of crypto on the Ethereum side before going all-in on GPUs. They are pure-play AI clouds, a different animal from the bitcoin-miner-turned-data-center crowd this article is about.
The catch
Now the part that does not fit on a jersey. These stocks have already run enormous distances in 2026, IREN included, so a lot of the good news is priced in. Backlog is not cash, it is a stack of contracts that still have to be delivered, and delivering means building liquid-cooled data centers on time, getting Nvidia chips when promised, and finding the gigawatts of power to run them. Any slip on that chain hurts. Most of these companies also still lean on bitcoin for a chunk of revenue, which ties them to a famously volatile asset. And there is customer concentration risk: when one hyperscaler is most of your backlog, you are exposed the moment that customer blinks.
The bigger overhang is the AI trade itself. If hyperscaler spending slows, the demand under all of these contracts gets shakier, and the highest-flying names fall fastest. We dug into whether that risk is real in this piece on the AI bubble question. None of this is a reason to write IREN off. It is a reason to remember that a flashy jersey patch is a marketing line item, not a guarantee that the buildout goes smoothly.
The jersey is the easy part. Putting your name on a Warriors uniform just takes a checkbook. Turning gigawatts of power and 150,000 GPUs into reliable, profitable AI cloud revenue is the actual game, and that is the number to watch long after the novelty of the badge wears off.
This article is for general informational purposes only and is not investment advice. Always do your own research and consider speaking with a licensed financial professional before making any investment decision.