IREN inks AI infrastructure deal with Nvidia

IREN shares surged in extended-trading on Thursday before giving back nearly all of the gains after the data center operator announced a partnership with semiconductor giant Nvidia.

Nvidia and IREN will deploy up to 5 gigawatts of the chip maker's DSX-branded infrastructure designs intended to power artificial intelligence workloads throughout the Australian firm's data center facilities across the world.

IREN shares climbed to around 27% as the news broke, then retreated and settled up about 6%.

The data center operator will issue Nvidia a five-year right to purchase up to 30 million shares of its ordinary stock at an exercise price of $70 per share, the company said in an announcement. Nvidia will have the right to invest $2.1 billion into the company via the deal.

"AI factories are becoming foundational infrastructure for the global economy," Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in a statement. "Deploying these systems at scale requires deep integration across the full stack — compute, networking, software, power and operations."

Nvidia has bolstered its stack by making similar deals involving multibillion-dollar purchase agreements with companies like Coherent, Lumentum and earlier this week, Corning.

In a separate release, IREN said it signed a five-year deal worth $3.4 billion to provide Nvidia with access to managed GPU cloud services "for its internal AI and research workloads." The deployment will be at IREN's existing data centers in Childress, Texas.

IREN one-day stock chart.