- IREN is a bitcoin mining operation turned neocloud
- It recently made headlines by striking deals with Nvidia and Mirantis
- The latter reflects a growing trend among neoclouds looking to flesh out their software portfolios
IREN has been on a tear lately. In the past week alone it has announced two major acquisitions and multi-billion-dollar deals with Nvidia. But who is the company and why are they suddenly everywhere?
Founded in 2018, U.S.-based IREN initially focused on bitcoin mining before pivoting its compute infrastructure to serve the AI market in 2024, following in the footsteps of peers including CoreWeave and Hut 8. IREN bagged a $9.7 billion AI infrastructure deal with Microsoft in November 2025 and since then it has been off to the races.
Since the start of the year, IREN has laid out plans to grow its fleet of GPUs to 150,000 and its data center capacity to 480 MW by the end of 2026.
IREN became a pivotal conversation point last week with its $625 million acquisition of Mirantis, a deal designed to flesh out its bare metal infrastructure approach with new Kubernetes-based orchestration and enterprise services.
“Mirantis brings three things IREN does not have at scale: orchestration software capable of managing GPU infrastructure across bare metal, virtual machines, and Kubernetes environments; a proven enterprise support capability built over more than a decade of production deployments; and an established customer base of more than 1,500 enterprise accounts representing years of operational relationships,” Futurum Group’s Nick Patience and Mitch Ashley wrote.
The neocloud followed up two days later by expanding into Europe with the acquisition of Spain-based Nostrum Group.
The same day, IREN made back-to-back blockbuster Nvidia announcements, revealing a $3.4 billion AI cloud compute contract with the company as well as a 5 GW deployment partnership giving Nvidia the right to invest up to $2.1 billion in IREN over the next five years.
Software scramble
But there’s a reason the Mirantis deal generated so much buzz. While multi-billion AI compute and investment deals feel like a dime a dozen these days, IREN’s play for Mirantis reflects a foundational challenge for neocloud players.
“Just being a pool of GPU capacity and renting GPU capacity, that has got a shelf life. And I'd argue that shelf life expires at the end of this year. It doesn't cut off at the end of December, but it's largely a 2026 thing,” HyperFRAME Research CEO Steven Dickens told Fierce. “I think the race for the Nebiuses and the CoreWeaves and the Lambda Labs and those guys is they've gotta race this year and put their foot flat to the floor to get away from just being seen as renting capacity.”
Dickens isn’t alone in thinking this way. Patience and Ashley noted that CoreWeave’s recent purchase of Weighs & Biases was – like IREN’s deal – designed to strengthen its software capabilities.
“Bare-metal GPU capacity is increasingly commoditized. The neoclouds that can offer an integrated stack, from power delivery through workload orchestration to enterprise support, are better positioned to serve enterprise customers directly, rather than as a pass-through layer for hyperscalers,” Patience and Ashley concluded. With Mirantis on its side, “IREN can credibly pursue a broader set of enterprise AI workloads, not just customers who want raw GPU access, but organizations that need managed AI infrastructure.”