NVIDIA Takes $2.1 Billion Warrant in IREN as Part of 5GW AI Data-Center Deal
May 8, 2026 – 10:23 am
NVIDIA will invest up to $2.1 billion in IREN as part of a deal pairing the chipmaker’s reference architecture with the data-center operator’s 5-gigawatt infrastructure pipeline. The two companies announced the partnership on Thursday.
The structure is unusual. Rather than a straight equity round, IREN has issued NVIDIA a five-year warrant for up to 30 million shares at an exercise price of $70. The stock closed regular trading at $56.85, then rose roughly 9% in extended trading after the announcement. If NVIDIA exercises in full, it would put the ticket size at $2.1 billion at the strike, with cash outflow timed at the chipmaker’s discretion rather than the deal-close date.
Operationally, the Sweetwater campus in Texas, currently sized at 2GW of planned capacity, comes first. IREN signed a $9.7 billion cloud agreement with Microsoft last year for capacity at the same site; the NVIDIA tie-up extends the same playbook with the chipmaker as both partner and shareholder.
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The deal slots IREN into a category that has become a familiar NVIDIA portfolio shape over the past eighteen months. The chipmaker has taken positions in CoreWeave, Nebius, and several other so-called “neoclouds,” the firms that buy NVIDIA GPUs at scale and rent them back to hyperscalers and frontier model builders.
Nebius Buying Eigen AI to Maximize Tokens per GPU was one of the most-watched plays in the same arc. The thesis is straightforward: AI demand outruns hyperscaler capacity faster than the hyperscalers can build, and NVIDIA benefits twice if the gap is filled by neoclouds running its silicon.
The numbers behind that thesis have grown larger each quarter. The four largest US tech companies have collectively guided to more than $700 billion in 2026 capex, much of it earmarked for AI infrastructure. Even at that pace, model providers and emerging enterprise users keep landing on waitlists for capacity. IREN at 5GW is a meaningful slice of the answer; the larger Texas grid build-out reframes that as a multi-year commitment.
IREN started life as Iris Energy, a Bitcoin miner with grid-tied infrastructure spread across Texas and British Columbia. It pivoted to AI compute in 2024, dropping the Iris Energy name in favor of the IREN ticker and the cloud-centric brand. The Microsoft deal in 2025 confirmed the pivot at scale; this NVIDIA announcement fixes the supply side.
The pivot from crypto to AI cloud is increasingly common. Hut 8, Applied Digital, and Core Scientific have all redirected at least part of their capacity. What separates IREN at this stage is its portfolio of grid interconnects in regions with cheap, abundant power—the constraint that has become more binding than capital for new AI builds.
Sweetwater is the demonstration site. Texas regulators have been faster to approve large interconnects than other states, and the campus sits adjacent to renewable generation that IREN can lock in on long-term contract.