Neocloud company IREN Ltd. has secured a $2.1 billion commitment from the chipmaker Nvidia Corp. as part of a new data center partnership aimed at artificial intelligence workloads.

The partners plan to deploy up to 5 gigawatts of Nvidia’s DSX-branded infrastructure in the neocloud company’s global network of data centers. Investors reacted positively to the news, with IREN’s stock gaining more than 27% at one point today, before settling back to an 8% gain in late trading.

New York-based IREN began life in 2018 as an Australian bitcoin mining startup that was originally called Iris Energy. Though it cashed in on the original cryptocurrency boom in the early 2020s, it soon realized that there was an even bigger opportunity to be had in the AI market. In 2024, it rebranded itself as IREN and started buying up graphics processing units and other AI accelerators, marketing itself as a GPU-as-a-service provider, following in the footsteps of companies like CoreWeave Inc.

Although IREN isn’t nearly as well-known as its rival, it has made some headlines recently. In November, it notably won a $9.7 billion contract with Microsoft Corp. to provide it with 200 megawatts of AI computing capacity. Then, just three days ago, it announced a deal to buy the data center infrastructure management software firm Mirantis Inc. for $625 million.

IREN’s cloud platform provides customers with access to bare metal GPU servers, and it allows companies with more advanced needs to set up custom AI data centers. It builds those facilities on its own data center campuses, so they can tap into the existing power infrastructure at those sites. It also manages them on behalf of customers.

As part of today’s deal, IREN will grant Nvidia a five-year right to purchase up to 30 million shares of ordinary stock at a price of $70 per share, which would generate $2.1 billion if the chipmaker makes good on that agreement. Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang said in a statement that AI factories are rapidly becoming foundational infrastructure for the global economy. “Deploying these systems at scale requires deep integration across the full stack — compute, networking, software, power and operations,” he added.

Nvidia has announced a string of multibillion-dollar agreements with data center infrastructure providers in recent weeks, including deals with companies like Corning Inc. and Marvell Technology Inc. In a second announcement, IREN said it has also agreed a five-year deal worth $3.4 billion to give Nvidia access to its managed GPU cloud services for “internal AI and research workloads.”

Photo: IREN