The bitcoin miner signed $2.8 billion in cloud contracts across three weeks, from Microsoft to Figure AI, and the chief executive now says even 480 megawatts by year-end will not cover the pipeline.
IREN raised its 2026 AI Cloud annualised revenue target to more than $4 billion after signing $2.8 billion in new customer contracts, and its shares jumped 25 per cent on 30 July when the chief executive told investors demand for the company's compute is already ahead of what it can build.
The Australian-listed miner announced the contract haul on 20 July. The named counterparties include Microsoft, NVIDIA, Perplexity, Figure AI, Together AI, Fluidstack, Fireworks AI, Fal AI and Hume AI, on a weighted average term of roughly four years. About 45 per cent of the associated GPU capital expenditure is prepaid, which is unusual: most AI cloud contracts settle monthly on consumption, and prepayment on that scale is the kind of collateral hyperscalers usually extract, not one they usually offer.
Chief executive Daniel Roberts said on 30 July that IREN's contracted book already covers 85 per cent of the $4 billion run rate. That leaves roughly $600 million of capacity for the second half of the year, against a stated policy of only signing when the equipment is close to delivery. Roberts told analysts demand from hyperscalers, enterprises, AI developers and frontier labs is running ahead of both installed and planned megawatts.
The physical build is the story behind the numbers. IREN has gone from about 3 megawatts of self-built AI Cloud capacity twelve months ago to 480 megawatts targeted by the end of 2026, and 1.2 gigawatts targeted for 2027. Miners talk in megawatts for a reason: power is the input the company already had, the input it can permit and the input everyone else in the AI cloud business is now trying to buy from them. Roberts has been consistent since Q1 that the industry-wide bottleneck is neither GPUs nor capital but energised sites with the transformers and cooling to run them.
IREN's rally on 30 July did not travel alone. TeraWulf closed up 17.06 per cent, MARA up 17.01 per cent and Cipher Digital up double digits, on a day when bitcoin itself was flat at $64,856. Part of the move traced to a forced unwind by a hedge fund founded by a former OpenAI researcher, which had held short positions across several of the miners that had reported the strongest AI compute pipelines. The rest was straightforward: IREN's guide reset the market price of megawatts across the sector, and every listed miner with power and land under contract was worth more by lunchtime.
The company that has been the most efficient at converting old bitcoin sites into AI cloud rooms is now the one that has run out of unsold capacity first. That is a strong signal about pricing power. AI compute is currently commanding roughly $25 per kilowatt-hour against about $1 per kilowatt-hour for bitcoin mining on CoinShares' math, and that spread is the reason the miner cohort spent the first half of 2026 selling bitcoin to fund the pivot. MARA sold 20,880 BTC for $1.5 billion in Q1 to cut convertible debt and reposition as a compute company. TeraWulf signed a $19 billion, twenty-year data centre lease with Anthropic on 7 July, a contract worth more than the miner's own market capitalisation on the day it was announced.
IREN's contracts sit against that industry backdrop rather than apart from it. What is different is the client concentration. Microsoft and NVIDIA are hyperscalers with the balance sheets to lock in long-dated capacity. Figure AI and Perplexity are venture-funded operators whose ability to prepay 45 per cent of capex on a four-year contract is the surprising line in the release. Prepayment on that scale means either the customers are more confident than the public equity market that AI compute pricing holds, or they are not confident and prepaid to lock the price in. Either reading is bullish for IREN's ARR visibility and neutral to negative for the spot GPU cloud market that competitors sell into.
The equity is now trading as an infrastructure story, not a mining story. Roberts has said explicitly that IREN intends to keep both revenue lines running because bitcoin mining absorbs the base load and AI cloud earns the peak. That is unusual. Most public miners are either winding down mining or spinning it out. IREN's guide is that mining stays, but on hardware paid off by AI revenue. Whether the market believes that construction plan through 2027 will be decided by the next two quarterly prints. The next one is 27 August.
