Nvidia $NVDA and data center operator IREN announced a partnership on Thursday to deploy up to 5 gigawatts of AI infrastructure, with Nvidia securing the right to invest up to $2.1 billion in the company.
The option, granted to Nvidia by IREN, covers up to 30 million shares priced at $70 apiece and runs for five years, the companies said. The arrangement is designed to accelerate large-scale AI factory deployment by bringing together Nvidia's factory architecture and IREN's infrastructure capabilities, according to Reuters. IREN's 2-gigawatt Sweetwater campus in Texas is slated to serve as the primary site for future build-outs under the agreement.
Separately, IREN announced a five-year cloud services contract with Nvidia valued at about $3.4 billion. Under that agreement, IREN will provide Nvidia with access to managed GPU cloud services for its internal AI and research workloads, including orchestration and cluster management software developed in collaboration with Mirantis. Air-cooled Blackwell platform systems at IREN's Childress, Texas campus, drawing on roughly 60 megawatts of existing capacity, will handle delivery of those services.
"We are excited to further strengthen our partnership with NVIDIA through this agreement," IREN Co-Founder and Co-CEO Daniel Roberts said in a statement. "This contract demonstrates our ability to deliver fully managed cloud solutions, not just bare metal, to a broad and growing customer base."
IREN is a vertically integrated AI cloud provider that builds and operates data centers for AI training and inference, with a power portfolio spanning renewable-rich regions across North America, Europe, and the Asia-Pacific region, the company said.
IREN's fiscal third-quarter earnings, released alongside the partnership news, showed revenue of $144.8 million — down from $184.7 million the quarter before, a drop the company tied to its shift away from bitcoin mining toward AI cloud services. On the bottom line, losses widened to $247.8 million from $155.4 million in the prior period. Analysts had been modeling $220.2 million in revenue and a loss of just $52.9 million, according to MarketWatch.
Nvidia has been building out a pattern of similar investment arrangements with companies across its supply chain and customer base. Its recent portfolio of such arrangements includes positions or options in Corning, Marvell Technology, Lumentum, Coherent, CoreWeave, Nebius, Synopsys $SNPS, and Nokia, according to Barron's. Earlier this week, Nvidia secured the right to invest up to $3.2 billion in Corning through stock warrants.
The company traces its roots to Iris Energy, an Australian bitcoin mining operation that rebranded and redirected its business toward AI computing, according to Barron's.