Microsoft Signs $9.7 Billion Deal with Australia's IREN to Boost AI Cloud Computing Capabilities

Microsoft is aggressively expanding its computing capacity to meet surging customer demand for AI services.

On Monday, the Redmond-based tech giant signed a $9.7 billion, five-year agreement with Australia-based IREN to further bolster its AI cloud infrastructure. Under the deal, Microsoft will leverage computing infrastructure powered by Nvidia’s GB300 GPUs, which will be rolled out in phases through 2026 at IREN’s facility in Childress, Texas, designed to support up to 750 megawatts of capacity.

IREN also disclosed that it is separately procuring approximately $5.8 billion worth of GPUs and related equipment from Dell.

This agreement follows Microsoft’s recent launch of its first Azure production cluster utilizing Nvidia’s GB300 NVL72 systems last month. The company stated that these systems are optimized for inference models, agentic AI workloads, and multimodal generative AI applications.

Last month, Microsoft also entered into a separate deal with Nscale to deploy roughly 200,000 Nvidia GB300 GPUs across three data centers in Europe and one in the United States.

Much like rivals such as CoreWeave, IREN began as a Bitcoin mining operation but quickly pivoted to AI workloads, recognizing that its extensive GPU inventory was better suited for artificial intelligence tasks. The strategic shift has proven highly lucrative. According to IREN CEO Daniel Roberts, the Microsoft contract will account for only about 10% of the company’s total capacity and is expected to generate approximately $1.94 billion in annualized revenue.