NVIDIA inks $3.4B IREN cloud deal as miner pivots to AI

IREN Limited completed a striking transformation from crypto miner to AI infrastructure provider, anchored by a five-year, $3.4 billion cloud-services contract with NVIDIA. The company reported AI revenue soaring 839% year-over-year to $33.6 million in Q3 2026 — now 23% of total revenue — and raised contracted annual recurring revenue to $3.1 billion while pushing secured power capacity to 5GW.

The deal mechanics reflect a broader pattern: former crypto-mining operators, sitting on cheap power and data-center real estate, are repurposing that infrastructure for the AI compute crunch, with NVIDIA as both supplier and anchor customer. Seeking Alpha maintained a BUY rating, citing strong execution and upgraded GPU targets for 2026, though it flagged dilution and liquidity risks.

Competitively, the IREN deal is one data point in NVIDIA's aggressive global infrastructure expansion this week — alongside a gigawatt-scale SK Telecom AI Cloud in Korea, France's 18,000 GB200 systems via Mistral, and the Vera Rubin platform unveiled at GTC Taipei. NVIDIA is locking in long-term GPU demand through capacity partnerships rather than one-off sales. Separately, NVIDIA DLSS support arrived in the open-source NVK Vulkan driver for Linux, a smaller but symbolically notable open-ecosystem move.

Watch next: whether other miners (and IREN itself) can sustain the AI-revenue growth rate, how NVIDIA balances these cloud deals against its hyperscaler customers, and power-availability constraints as 5GW commitments multiply.