Ddos 
Microsoft recently announced the signing of a five-year agreement with Australian infrastructure operator IREN, valued at up to $9.7 billion, aimed at securing additional AI cloud computing capacity to meet the surging global demand for its AI services.
This marks Microsoft’s second major procurement initiative in the AI infrastructure race, following last month’s deal with cloud startup Nscale, as the company continues to strengthen the backbone of its rapidly expanding AI ecosystem.
Under the agreement, Microsoft will gain access to IREN’s high-performance computing infrastructure built on NVIDIA GB300 GPUs. IREN plans to deploy the system in stages throughout 2026 at its Childress, Texas facility, which is designed to support up to 750 megawatts (MW) of compute capacity.
To fulfill this massive expansion, IREN announced an additional investment of approximately $5.8 billion in partnership with Dell, which will supply the required GPUs and related hardware components.
In recent months, Microsoft has moved aggressively to bolster its AI computing power. In October, the company launched its first production cluster for Azure Cloud, featuring NVIDIA GB300 NVL72 systems—purpose-built to optimize workloads for inference models, agentic AI, and multimodal generative AI.
That same month, Microsoft also entered into a separate agreement with Nscale to procure around 200,000 NVIDIA GB300 GPUs, which will be deployed across four data centers in Europe and North America.
Interestingly, IREN shares a similar origin story with emerging AI infrastructure providers such as CoreWeave. Initially operating as a Bitcoin mining company, IREN pivoted its business model upon realizing that its extensive GPU assets were far more profitable when allocated to AI workloads. This strategic transition allowed the company to capitalize on the booming demand for AI computing resources.
According to Bloomberg, IREN CEO Daniel Roberts revealed that the Microsoft contract will utilize only about 10% of the company’s total compute throughput, yet is expected to generate approximately $1.94 billion in annualized revenue, underscoring the extraordinary profitability of the AI infrastructure sector.
Similarly, Nscale, Microsoft’s other recent partner, originated as part of Bitcoin miner Arkon Energy before spinning off in 2022 to become a dedicated AI infrastructure provider, following the industry-wide surge in demand for high-performance compute power.
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