IREN Shares Jump as AI Cloud Sales Triple and $4 Billion Run-Rate Target Shifts to 2027

IREN Limited reported that revenue for its fiscal first quarter increased 66% sequentially to $228 million, driven by a rapid expansion in its artificial intelligence compute operations, even as the company pushed back its $4 billion annualized revenue milestone by at least one month.

Shares of the data center operator surged more than 15% in morning trading following the release, as reported by Yahoo Finance (https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/iren-stock-jumps-despite-delay-191527859.html?.tsrc=rss). The rebound followed a turbulent month in which specialized cloud and data center equities fell sharply amid rising scrutiny over capital costs and infrastructure delivery schedules.

The quarterly results demonstrate the ongoing transformation of former cryptocurrency mining operators into dedicated high-performance AI infrastructure providers. For IREN, cloud compute has quickly superseded digital asset operations: AI cloud revenue climbed 182% sequentially to $200 million, while legacy bitcoin mining revenue dropped from $67 million to $28 million. The company's net loss narrowed to $263 million from $684 million in the prior quarter, and adjusted EBITDA grew from $19 million to $66 million.

Management postponed its target to reach $4 billion in operational annualized run-rate revenue from year-end 2026 to January 2027, noting the timeline could extend to late February. On an earnings call, Co-Chief Executive Officer Daniel Roberts said the delay stemmed from supplier timelines and a network reconfiguration requested by anchor customer Microsoft. Roberts explained that Microsoft sought architectural upgrades across the Horizon 1 campus to support 200 megawatts of capacity tailored to current frontier AI models.

IREN reported that its total revenue backlog expanded 22% sequentially to $20.3 billion, with approximately two-thirds linked to investment-grade counterparties. Since the close of the September quarter, the company signed a five-year contract priced at roughly $22 million per megawatt, under which the customer agreed to prepay 90% of the associated GPU capital expenditures. The firm also agreed to a short-term deal at $40 million per megawatt and expanded capacity commitments with an unnamed frontier AI research lab.

Capital requirements remain the decisive challenge for the neocloud business model. IREN projected $15 billion in planned capital expenditures for the remainder of fiscal 2027. Management stated that $9 billion of that outlay is backed by existing cash, customer prepayments, and committed GPU borrowing facilities, leaving $6 billion in target financing that still must be secured across debt markets, equipment credit, and customer prepayments subject to financial market conditions.