Microsoft is leaving no stone unturned in its quest to secure more computing capacity to meet the huge demand for AI services from its customers.
On Monday, the Redmond-based tech giant signed a $9.7 billion, five-year contract with Australia’s IREN to secure AI cloud capacity. The deal will give Microsoft access to compute infrastructure built with Nvidia’s GB300 GPUs, which will be deployed in phases at IREN’s facility in Childress, Texas, through 2026, with plans to support 750 MW of capacity.
IREN said it is separately buying GPUs and equipment from Dell for about $5.8 billion.
The deal comes after Microsoft launched last month First production cluster with Nvidia’s GB300 NVL72 systems for AzureWhich are optimized for reasoning models, agentic AI systems and multi-modal generator AI, the company said.
Last month, Microsoft Signed an agreement with Enscale For approximately 200,000 Nvidia GB300 GPUs for three data centers in Europe and one in the US
Similar to competitors like CoreWeave, IREN started out as a Bitcoin-mining operation, but quickly realized that its vast collection of GPUs were better put to use for AI workloads. The change in focus has benefited the company in a big way. According to Bloomberg, the company’s CEO Daniel Roberts expects that the deal with Microsoft will take up only 10% of the company’s total capacity and generate annual revenue of about $1.94 billion. informed,
