Microsoft is doing everything possible to secure more computing power to meet high customer demand for AI services.
On Monday, the Redmond-based technology giant signed a $9.7 billion, five-year contract with Australia’s IREN to secure additional AI cloud capacity. The deal gives Microsoft access to computing infrastructure built with Nvidia’s GB300 GPUs. This infrastructure will be phased in at IREN’s facility in Childress, Texas, through 2026 and will support 750 megawatts of capacity.
IREN announced that it will separately purchase GPUs and equipment from Dell for approximately $5.8 billion.
The deal comes after Microsoft last month launched its first production cluster on Azure powered by Nvidia’s GB300 NVL72 system, which the company says is optimized for inference models, agent AI systems, and multimodal generative AI.
Last month, Microsoft signed a deal with Nscale to provide approximately 200,000 Nvidia GB300 GPUs to three data centers in Europe and one data center in the United States.
Like competitors such as CoreWeave, IREN started out as a Bitcoin mining operation, but quickly realized that its vast collection of GPUs would be better used for AI workloads. The company has benefited greatly from the change in focus. According to a report by Bloomberg, the company’s CEO Daniel Roberts said the partnership with Microsoft would represent only 10% of the company’s total production capacity and expected annual sales to reach about $1.94 billion.
