Microsoft is leaving no stone unturned in its quest to secure more computing capacity to meet the high demand for artificial intelligence services from its customers.
On Monday, the Redmond-based tech giant signed a five-year, $9.7 billion deal with Australia’s IREN to secure increased AI cloud capacity. The deal will give Microsoft access to computing infrastructure built with Nvidia’s GB300 GPUs, which will be deployed in phases through 2026 at IREN’s facility in Childress, Texas, and are expected to support 750 megawatts of capacity.
IREN said it is separately purchasing GPUs and equipment from Dell for about $5.8 billion.
The deal comes after Microsoft last month launched its first production cluster with Nvidia GB300 NVL72 systems for Azurewhich, according to the company, are optimized for reasoning models, agent artificial intelligence systems and multimodal generative artificial intelligence.
Last month, Microsoft signed a deal with Nscale for approximately 200,000 Nvidia GB300 GPUs for three data centers in Europe and one in the US.
Like competitors like CoreWeave, IREN started out as a bitcoin mining operation, but quickly realized it was better off using its massive collection of GPUs for AI workloads. The company has benefited greatly from the change in focus. The company’s CEO, Daniel Roberts, expects the deal with Microsoft to occupy just 10% of the company’s total capacity and generate about $1.94 billion in annualized revenue, Bloomberg reported.
