Bitcoin miner IREN raises $3.65B to buy NVIDIA chips for Microsoft

Source Cryptopolitan

IREN Limited (NASDAQ: IREN) locked down $3.65 billion in investment-grade debt on Monday. The money pays for GPU hardware under a multiyear AI cloud contract with Microsoft. This is the first deal of its kind in the U.S. private placement market, according to the release.

Fitch rated the facility A, while DBRS called it A(low). Rating agencies see the arrangement as a relatively high-quality debt. Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan arranged the deal and helped structure and sell the financing to investors.

The facility is comprised of two pieces: a $2.10 billion private placement carries a fixed rate equivalent to SOFR plus 2.13%. And a $1.55 billion delayed draw term loan floats at SOFR plus 2.25%. IREN hedged the floating piece and landed a blended borrowing cost of 6.00%.

The collateral is NVIDIA GPUs and the contracted cash flows from Microsoft.

IREN funds ~96% of its Microsoft GPU bill

IREN’s GPU bill under the Microsoft contract runs $5.81 billion. The new facility, plus prepayments from Microsoft, covers ~96% of that, or $5.59 billion. The average financing cost across all is 3.31%.

IREN Limited has a $9.7 billion AI cloud contract with Microsoft, spread over five years. The company will deliver GPU capacity to Microsoft across four data centers in Childress, Texas. It operates a 200 megawatt campus there, which is part of a larger 750 megawatt site.

Dell said in November it would supply racks of NVIDIA GB300 GPUs and related equipment for the buildout based on a separate purchase agreement.

Why is IREN’s GPU financing structure the “first” in this space?

GPU financing at investment-grade terms hasn’t existed before in the compute infrastructure sector. Companies deploying thousands of GPUs for AI training face billions in upfront hardware costs. Tapping institutional debt markets at rates below 6.5% beats equity raises or higher rate lending.

“Securing investment-grade financing on these terms reflects both the quality of our customer contracts and the fact that we own the data center infrastructure these GPUs run in,” said Daniel Roberts, IREN’s co-founder and co-CEO. “That combination broadens our access to institutional capital and lowers our cost of capital as we scale.”

IREN plans to have 480 megawatts of AI cloud capacity by the end of 2026.

The deal comes weeks after Bernstein gave IREN an outperform rating, grouping it with Riot Platforms, CleanSpark, and Core Scientific. All four own power and land, which positions them to capture AI data center demand. Among that group, IREN and Core Scientific have moved furthest into contracted AI hosting. The others are earlier in their pivot from pure crypto mining.

IREN’s market cap stood at $23.62 billion as of Monday. The stock is exchanging hands at $64.66, up by 1.75% based on Google Finance data. Its current ratio of 3.72 suggests comfortable short-term liquidity even after adding $3.65 billion in new obligations.

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