IREN stock rises 13% after $1.6B Dell Blackwell purchase

IREN shares rose 13% Wednesday after the company announced a $1.6 billion purchase agreement with Dell Technologies to buy Nvidia-powered Blackwell systems for its Childress, Texas data centers. The air-cooled systems are intended to expand AI cloud capacity under a five-year, $3.4 billion managed AI cloud services contract and are scheduled for commissioning in early 2027.

Under the agreement, Dell will supply GPUs, servers, storage, networking equipment, ancillary hardware, integration services and warranties. Payments are planned to follow delivery. IREN said the Blackwell systems will be deployed across about 60 megawatts of capacity at its Childress facilities and will support Nvidia-related cloud AI workloads and cluster management software developed with Mirantis.

IREN projects that once the systems are operational the cloud AI contract will lift its annualized run-rate revenue to $4.4 billion from $3.7 billion. The Dell purchase was announced alongside other industry arrangements, including Nvidia’s plan to invest up to $2.1 billion tied to a potential deployment of as much as 5 gigawatts of infrastructure and a separate $9.7 billion agreement with Microsoft that includes access to Nvidia advanced AI chips.

In a statement, IREN co-founder Daniel Roberts wrote that securing capacity and accelerating commissioning are top priorities in a market where time-to-compute matters. He added that the relationship with Dell will help the company access hardware at needed scale and speed.

The agreement reflects rising demand for high-performance AI compute as cloud customers, hyperscalers and enterprises compete for GPU capacity for large-scale model training and inference. Nvidia executives have reported higher cloud GPU rental prices, with rental rates for Nvidia H100 chips up about 20% year-to-date and A100 pricing up about 15%.

IREN’s current strategy builds on infrastructure originally developed for Bitcoin mining. The company shifted from mining to operating AI-focused data centers by repurposing large-scale power and server facilities able to support energy-intensive computing. That transition and recent contracts have contributed to the company’s performance in the AI infrastructure sector over the past year.

Commissioning of the Blackwell systems is set for early 2027 and will be followed by integration into IREN’s existing operations in Childress. The hardware and service components in the agreement are intended to provide compute capacity and operational support as the company scales its managed AI cloud services.