Microsoft has signed a five-year agreement worth about $9.7 billion with IREN Limited, an Australia-based company that provides AI cloud and data center infrastructure. The deal gives Microsoft access to IREN’s powerful GPU computing systems (which are built using Nvidia’s advanced AI chips) to help expand the tech giant’s cloud and artificial intelligence (AI) capacity. The agreement is clearly part of the Satya Nadella-led company’s effort to secure more computing power for its growing AI operations, including those that support OpenAI’s models and Microsoft’s own Copilot tools.
Under this partnership, IREN (which began as a cryptocurrency mining company before shifting to AI and high-performance computing) will deliver large-scale GPU resources through its data centers in Texas (particularly at its Childress campus), which has around 750 megawatts of total capacity. The project will include new, liquid-cooled data center facilities designed to handle about 200 megawatts of critical computing load, with construction and deployment expected to continue into 2026. The GPUs will be based on Nvidia’s latest GB300 architecture, designed for high-performance AI workloads.
In parallel, to support this expansion, IREN has also entered into a separate deal with Dell Technologies worth around $5.8 billion for the supply of servers and supporting infrastructure. As per the deal, Microsoft will make a pre-payment of about 20% of the total contract value upfront, providing IREN with funding to purchase equipment and build out the required capacity. Once fully operational, IREN expects the deal to generate around $1.9 billion in annual revenue across the life of the contract.
For Microsoft, the partnership helps relieve pressure on its AI computing supply chain, which has faced increasing demand as more customers and partners rely on Azure’s AI capabilities. And rather than investing billions to build new data centers from scratch, the software giant is choosing to work with specialized providers like IREN.
“IREN’s expertise in building and operating a fully integrated AI cloud — from data centers to GPU stack — combined with their secured power capacity makes them a strategic partner,” Jonathan Tinter (President, Business Development and Ventures at Microsoft) said.
The timing of this development is especially notable, as it comes shortly after Microsoft witnessed two major cloud service outages that disrupted its global digital operations in October 2025. The first incident occurred on October 20, when Amazon Web Services (AWS) suffered a large-scale disruption in its US-East-1 region in Virginia due to a DNS system failure, causing temporary blackouts across numerous online platforms, including streaming, retail, and enterprise services that depend on AWS. Later, on October 29, the company experienced its own widespread Azure cloud outage, which affected Microsoft 365, Office 365, and Xbox Live users around the world. At the same time, some recent reports suggest that Microsoft plans to move GitHub’s infrastructure to its Azure cloud platform, with the migration expected to take around 12 to 18 months to complete.
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