IREN Limited (NASDAQ: IREN) and Cipher Mining Inc. (NASDAQ:CIFR), Bitcoin miners pivoting to AI infrastructure providers, are making some hefty business moves today, and their stocks have been reflecting it.
IREN signed a five-year, $9.7 billion agreement with Microsoft for GPU cloud computing services. The deal gives Microsoft access to NVIDIA GB300 GPUs managed by IREN at its Childress, Texas campus, with a phased deployment of GPU capacity throughout 2026.
The contract includes a 20% prepayment and positions IREN as a key hyperscaler partner for the first time.
Four new liquid-cooled data centers, Horizon 1 through Horizon 4, will support 200 megawatts of critical IT load, while a separate $5.8 billion agreement with Dell Technologies covers the purchase of GPUs, servers, and associated infrastructure.
CEO Daniel Roberts said the partnership could generate roughly $1.94 billion in annualized revenue once fully deployed. Following the announcement, IREN shares jumped more than 28% in pre-market trading.
The stock is now up 8% in intraday trading. IREN, which has seen its Nasdaq stock surge over 500% this year, joins other AI-focused “neocloud” providers, many of which originated in cryptocurrency mining.
Cipher Mining’s deal with Amazon
Meanwhile, Cipher Mining secured a $5.5 billion, 15-year lease agreement with Amazon Web Services (NASDAQ: AMZN) to provide turnkey space and power for AI workloads.
Cipher will deliver 300 megawatts of capacity in 2026 through air- and liquid-cooled facilities in two phases, with rent starting in August 2026. Additionally, the company announced a joint venture to develop a 1-gigawatt site named “Colchis” in West Texas, in which it will hold roughly 95% equity.
Combined with prior deals with Fluidstack and Google, Cipher’s AI hosting contracts now represent approximately $8.5 billion in lease payments.
Cipher shares rose 15% in pre-market trading following the news. The stock is now up 14% in intraday trading.
Bitcoin mining success with an AI twist
Bitcoin mining and crypto infrastructure stocks have seen a big rally over the past six months, and IREN Limited is a standout example.
Investors have rewarded companies that can combine traditional bitcoin mining with scalable, revenue-generating AI or data-center services.
In IREN’s case, the stock’s recent surge comes after a major GPU expansion and analyst upgrades, and now this new Microsoft news is helping boost the price.
This reflects a wider market appetite for miners that offer optionality: steady bitcoin cash flows to fund new ventures, while also positioning for high-growth technology trends.
In essence, the past half-year has favored bitcoin-mining firms that can monetize excess power, land, and data-center capacity beyond mining.
The rally is less about bitcoin prices alone and more about miners evolving into hybrid tech infrastructure operators with diversified revenue streams.
Source: https://bitcoinmagazine.com/markets/iren-cipher-cifr-mining-stock-soar
