A Bitcoin Miner Just Bought $1.6 Billion in Chips From the Guy Who Owns Its Stock
Three years ago IREN dug for Bitcoin. This week it agreed to spend about $1.6 billion on Dell systems packed with Nvidia's Blackwell GPUs for a data center in Childress, Texas, and the stock jumped almost 29% in a day. The pitch is clean: it's not a miner anymore, it's an AI cloud company, and the run-rate revenue climbs toward $4.4 billion by early 2027. Yahoo Finance Here's the part the headline skips. The $1.6 billion buys hardware to feed a five-year, $3.4 billion AI cloud contract with Nvidia. And Nvidia isn't just the customer at the other end of that contract. Nvidia also holds an option on up to 30 million IREN shares at $70 apiece, a stake worth around $2.1 billion. BigGo FinanceThe Motley Fool So read the loop slowly. Nvidia takes a position in IREN. IREN turns around and buys Nvidia chips through Dell. Nvidia books the sale, the revenue looks real, the stock of both companies goes up. The money makes a lap and comes home. This isn't IREN's invention. It's the move of the whole AI build-out right now. Nvidia put as much as $100 billion into OpenAI to fund data centers stuffed with Nvidia's chips. Somebody on the internet called Nvidia the central bank of AI, and it stuck because it's basically true. JPMorgan looked at IREN's version of this and slapped a Sell on it, flagging the circular nature of the Nvidia relationship. business-standardBigGo Finance We've watched this film before. During the dotcom run, Cisco lent telecoms the money to buy more Cisco routers. The sales looked great until the capital dried up and the whole thing collapsed. Vendor financing isn't a cri
