Microsoft has signed a strategic five-year agreement worth 9.7 billion dollars with digital infrastructure provider IREN to secure additional computing capacity dedicated to artificial intelligence. The contract includes a 20% upfront payment and will allow the company to access servers equipped with advanced NVIDIA processors, strengthening its ability to train and deploy AI models amid rapidly accelerating global demand.
Following the announcement, IREN’s shares surged more than 20% in pre-market trading on Wall Street, reflecting the magnitude of the deal and its expected impact on the company’s infrastructure expansion. The new capacity will be hosted primarily in high-efficiency data centers, including facilities in Texas, featuring liquid-cooling technology and high-performance energy modules. This strategy enables Microsoft to leverage existing infrastructure and accelerate its AI growth without immediately building new sites, reducing timelines and operational costs in a fiercely competitive technology landscape.
At the same time, IREN announced an additional agreement with Dell for the acquisition and supply of server chips and key components for its data-center network, valued at 5.8 billion dollars. With these partnerships, IREN accelerates its transition from the digital-asset mining sector toward advanced cloud computing services, while Microsoft further strengthens its leadership in artificial intelligence, securing critical resources to train and scale next-generation models in the years ahead.
