AI Infrastructure from the Dirt to the Cloud; Initiate at Buy

Research evidence excerpt

AI Infrastructure from the Dirt to the Cloud; Initiate at Buy

winter set in. Bitcoin fell below

$20k by year-end 2022, compressing margins industry-wide. IREN's revenue dropped to $75M in

FY2023, and its stock sank over 90% from the IPO. The company avoided over-leveraging – when

two project subsidiaries could not service approximately $100M of mining rig loans, IREN let them

default, sacrificing some machines but protecting the parent balance sheet. This left IREN with minimal

debt and ~$110M cash at the end of 2023. During this challenging period, management revisited its

long-term strategy. They recognized that the "power-dense data centers" they had built for Bitcoin

could meet the exploding demand for AI and HPC workloads. In 2023, IREN began reallocating capital,

slowing miner purchases, and instead invested in GPUs and related infrastructure. In Q1 2024, IREN

quietly installed a pilot AI cluster (NVIDIA H100) to support Poolside AI, testing its ability to deliver

cloud GPU services. The success of this pilot (and the rapid 2-year payback on GPUs) confirmed the

viability of IREN's pivot, just as generative AI enthusiasm was reaching a fever pitch in the tech world.

A Pivotal Shift Toward AI Infrastructure (2025-YTD): 2025 was a strong year for Crypto, with Bitcoin

reaching new highs above $120k, which supported a return to strong mining profitability. Despite a

constructive BTC backdrop, the company paused mining expansion after reaching its long-term

target of 50 EH and shifted focus toward its GPU cloud initiative. The AI infrastructure pivot drove

rapid scaling. By September 2025, IREN had ~2,100 GPUs online and owned 23,300 GPUs, primarily

Blackwell. The company also secured a 600 MW interconnection for Sweetwater 2 in West Texas,