Shares of Bitcoin mining and AI cloud infrastructure firm IREN Ltd. (NASDAQ: IREN) jumped 10.41% to $48.22 in early trading Thursday after the company said Microsoft had accepted its first AI Cloud deployment and NVIDIA had awarded it Exemplar Cloud status for its GB300 NVL72 infrastructure.
According to Yahoo Finance data (at 1:51:44 p.m UTC), IREN opened at $45.97, after closing Wednesday at $43.67, and reached an intraday high of $49.13. About 17.71 million shares had traded by then, compared with an average daily volume of 45.36 million.
The move followed IREN’s announcement that Horizon 1, a 50-megawatt IT-load AI data-center deployment at its Childress, Texas campus, had been delivered to and accepted by Microsoft. The company said NVIDIA also completed testing of the deployment, resulting in its Exemplar Cloud designation for NVIDIA’s GB300 NVL72 platform.
Microsoft accepts first Horizon deployment
Horizon 1 is the first of four 50MW direct-to-chip liquid-cooled AI Cloud deployments that IREN is scheduled to deliver to Microsoft in 2026. The deployments are part of a five-year, $9.7 billion cloud-services contract announced in November 2025. IREN said Horizons 2 through 4 remain scheduled for delivery later this year.
The Microsoft agreement is central to IREN’s shift from a business historically centered on Bitcoin mining toward large-scale AI infrastructure. The company said Horizon 1’s delivery reflects its control over the design, engineering, and construction of the facilities used for its GPU deployments.
NVIDIA validates GB300 NVL72 deployment
IREN also said it achieved NVIDIA Exemplar Cloud status after NVIDIA tested its GB300 NVL72 deployment at Horizon 1. The designation relates to the company’s ability to operate the NVIDIA platform for AI workloads. It does not represent a new customer contract or revenue commitment.
The development gives IREN two separate milestones from major technology companies on the same infrastructure: Microsoft has accepted the first deployment, while NVIDIA has completed testing of the underlying GB300 NVL72 system.
Chief Market Strategist Shay Boloor of Futurum Equities said in an X post on Thursday that IREN’s delivery of the first 50MW Horizon facility to Microsoft, alongside NVIDIA’s validation of the GB300 deployment, marked key milestones for the company’s AI infrastructure rollout.
Boloor said the next test would be whether IREN delivers Horizons 2 through 4 on schedule this year. He noted that completing those facilities would bring the Microsoft buildout to 200MW, while IREN is targeting 480MW of AI Cloud capacity in 2026 and 1.2GW in 2027.
IREN raises AI Cloud revenue target
The latest announcement follows a July 20 update in which IREN raised its year-end 2026 AI Cloud annualized run-rate revenue target to more than $4 billion, from $3.7 billion.
The company said about 85% of that target was under contract, following $2.8 billion of new multiyear cloud-services agreements with AI developers. Its customer base at the time included Microsoft, NVIDIA, Perplexity, Figure AI, Together AI, Fluidstack, Fireworks AI, Fal AI and Hume AI, among others.
IREN said its weighted-average customer contract term across the portfolio was about four years and that recent agreements included customer prepayments equal to roughly 45% of associated GPU capital expenditure.
Capacity expansion remains the next test
IREN has said it is targeting 480MW of gross AI Cloud capacity by the end of 2026 and 1.2GW in 2027. The company is expanding across several data-center sites, including Childress and Sweetwater in Texas, as well as projects in Canada, Australia, and Oklahoma. Its investor materials list Childress with a planned 750MW capacity and Sweetwater at 2,000MW.
The immediate focus, however, remains on completing the Microsoft deployments and bringing contracted capacity online.
Stronger AI business changes IREN’s mix
The AI infrastructure push is changing the financial profile investors are watching at IREN. Bitcoin mining remains part of the business, but the company’s recent announcements have increasingly centered on contracted AI Cloud capacity, GPU deployments and data-center construction.
As of June 30, IREN reported approximately $7.6 billion in cash and cash equivalents, according to the company’s July update. The company has also said it is prioritizing customer diversification and contracted demand as it allocates capacity across its 2026 and 2027 expansion plans.
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