IREN, a former Australian Bitcoin miner, has obtained Microsoft’s validation for Horizon 1, the first of four data centers to be delivered under a 9.7 billion dollar contract signed in November 2025. This 50-megawatt facility, located in Childress, Texas and cooled by direct liquid cooling of the chips, has also received Nvidia’s « Exemplar Cloud » label, a certification reserved for providers meeting its performance standards on GB300 GPUs. Once all four sites are fully operational, the contract is expected to generate approximately 1.94 billion dollars in annualized revenue, with a target of 4 billion dollars in AI run rate by year-end. However, construction requires some 5.8 billion dollars in equipment, partly funded by 3.65 billion dollars in debt raised in June. This pivot reflects a broader sector trend: publicly listed Bitcoin miners have reduced their combined computing power by 21% over three quarters, as AI captures both the capital and electricity previously devoted to mining.
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