IREN and Cipher Mining announced a strategic AI infrastructure deal, sending both companies' stock prices significantly higher.
IREN Limited (NASDAQ: IREN) and Cipher Mining Inc. (NASDAQ: CIFR), Bitcoin miners pivoting to AI infrastructure providers, announced significant partnerships reflecting their strategic shift away from cryptocurrency toward artificial intelligence infrastructure. IREN signed a five-year, $9.7 billion agreement with Microsoft for GPU cloud computing services, granting Microsoft access to NVIDIA GB300 GPUs managed by IREN at its Childress, Texas campus, with phased deployment throughout 2026. The contract includes a 20% prepayment and positions IREN as a key hyperscaler partner for the first time. Four new liquid-cooled data centers, Horizon 1 through Horizon 4, will support 200 megawatts of critical IT load, while a separate $5.8 billion agreement with Dell Technologies covers the purchase of GPUs, servers, and associated infrastructure. CEO Daniel Roberts stated the partnership could generate roughly $1.94 billion in annualized revenue once fully deployed. Following the announcement, IREN shares jumped more than 28% in pre-market trading and are now up 8% in intraday trading, with the stock having surged over 500% this year.
Cipher Mining secured a $5.5 billion, 15-year lease agreement with Amazon Web Services (NASDAQ: AMZN) to provide turnkey space and power for AI workloads. The company will deliver 300 megawatts of capacity in 2026 through air- and liquid-cooled facilities in two phases, with rent starting in August 2026. Additionally, Cipher announced a joint venture to develop a 1-gigawatt site named "Colchis" in West Texas, in which it will hold roughly 95% equity. Combined with prior deals with Fluidstack and Google, Cipher's AI hosting contracts now represent approximately $8.5 billion in lease payments. Cipher shares rose 15% in pre-market trading following the news and are now up 14% in intraday trading.
The recent rally reflects a broader market appetite for miners that can combine traditional bitcoin mining with scalable, revenue-generating AI and data-center services. Investors have rewarded companies offering optionality: steady bitcoin cash flows to fund new ventures while positioning for high-growth technology trends. The past half-year has favored bitcoin-mining firms that can monetize excess power, land, and data-center capacity beyond mining, with the rally driven less by bitcoin prices alone and more by miners evolving into hybrid tech infrastructure operators with diversified revenue streams.