Microsoft Inks $9.7bil Deal With Australia’s Iren For Ai Cloud Capacity

In Brief

Microsoft is leaving nary chromatic unturned successful its quest to unafraid much compute capacity for gathering its customers’ dense request for AI services.

On Monday, nan Redmond-based tech elephantine signed a $9.7 billion, five-year statement pinch Australia’s IREN to unafraid further AI unreality capacity. The woody will springiness Microsoft entree to compute infrastructure built pinch Nvidia’s GB300 GPUs, which will beryllium deployed complete phases done 2026 astatine IREN’s installation successful Childress, Texas, planned to support 750 megawatts of capacity.

IREN said it is separately buying GPUs and instrumentality from Dell for astir $5.8 billion.

The woody comes aft Microsoft past period launched its first accumulation cluster pinch Nvidia’s GB300 NVL72 systems for Azure, which, nan institution said, are optimized for reasoning models, agentic AI systems and multi-modal generative AI.

Last month, Microsoft signed a woody pinch Nscale for astir 200,000 Nvidia GB300 GPUs to 3 information centers successful Europe and 1 successful nan U.S.

Similar to competitors for illustration CoreWeave, IREN started disconnected arsenic a bitcoin-mining operation, but quickly realized that its monolithic postulation of GPUs were amended put to usage for AI workloads. The institution has benefited massively from nan displacement successful focus. The company’s CEO Daniel Roberts expects nan Microsoft woody to return up only 10% of nan company’s full capacity and make astir $1.94 cardinal successful annualized revenue, Bloomberg reported.

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