Microsoft is leaving no stone unturned in its quest to secure more compute capacity for meeting its customers’ heavy demand for AI services.
On Monday, the Redmond-based tech giant signed a $9.7 billion, five-year contract with Australia’s IREN to secure further AI cloud capacity. The deal will give Microsoft access to compute infrastructure built with Nvidia’s GB300 GPUs, which will be deployed over phases through 2026 at IREN’s facility in Childress, Texas, planned to support 750 megawatts of capacity.
IREN said it is separately buying GPUs and equipment from Dell for about $5.8 billion.
The deal comes after Microsoft last month launched its first production cluster with Nvidia’s GB300 NVL72 systems for Azure, which, the company said, are optimized for reasoning models, agentic AI systems and multi-modal generative AI.
Last month, Microsoft signed a deal with Nscale for approximately 200,000 Nvidia GB300 GPUs to three data centers in Europe and one in the U.S.
Similar to competitors like CoreWeave, IREN started off as a bitcoin-mining operation, but quickly realized that its massive collection of GPUs were better put to use for AI workloads. The company has benefited massively from the shift in focus. The company’s CEO Daniel Roberts expects the Microsoft deal to take up only 10% of the company’s total capacity and generate about $1.94 billion in annualized revenue, Bloomberg reported.
