IREN Limited IREN has secured about $9.3 billion worth of funding over the past eight months through customer prepayments, convertible notes, graphics processing units (GPU) leasing and financing. The company aims to use this capital to fund GPU purchases and data center build-out linked to its customer contracts.
The company plans to spend about $3.5 billion in the second half of 2026 to expand its GPU fleet and strengthen the capacity of its AI cloud infrastructure. It has agreed to purchase more than 50,000 NVIDIA B300 GPUs, which will increase the total GPU fleet to about 150,000 GPUs. These GPUs will be deployed at Mackenzie and Childress using existing data center capacity, with spending covering hardware, servers, networking and installation.
For the Microsoft contract, the GPU-related capex is largely funded. In the second quarter of fiscal 2026, IREN secured $3.6 billion in GPU financing and received about $1.9 billion in customer prepayments. Together, these cover about 95% of the GPU capex needed for the Microsoft contract. Here, Financing is structured to match the contract term and is secured against the GPUs and contracted cash flows.
For the remaining capital required for the company’s GPU expansion, management said that capital will be raised alongside customer agreements. The company indicated it will use a mix of financing, prepayments and other funding sources, and will align capital spending with deployment timelines and signed contracts.
Currently, the funding appears to be sufficient for IREN’s GPU expansion. The company plans for the GPUs to be deployed in phases during the second half of 2026, but the key risk lies in execution. Any delays in deployment might hurt the company’s ability to generate revenues and raise a question mark on the company’s ability to generate return on investment.
IREN faces intense competition from Applied Digital APLD and TeraWulf WULF in the AI infrastructure space.
Applied Digital recently announced the pricing of $2.15 billion senior secured notes to fund its Polaris Forge 2 data center project in North Dakota. The notes carry an interest rate of 6.75% and will mature in 2031. Applied Digital plans to use the funds to build 200 megawatts of data center capacity at the Polaris Forge 2 campus.
In December 2025, TeraWulf and Fluidstack finalized the pricing for financing their 168 MW high-performance computing joint venture at the Abernathy, Texas site. TeraWulf will use this funding to build a liquid-cooled AI data center with a total power capacity of up to 240 MW. The project is supported by a long-term hosting agreement backed by a strong customer through Fluidstack, which improves the project’s financial strength.
