IREN Soars on Microsoft AI Deal, Bernstein Ups Target to $125

The landmark agreement between Sydney-based IREN and Microsoft represents one of the most substantial partnerships between a Bitcoin miner and a technology titan to date. Under the five-year, $9.7 billion cloud services arrangement, IREN will provide Microsoft with access to Nvidia’s cutting-edge GB300 GPUs, positioning the cryptocurrency miner as a key infrastructure provider in the competitive AI computing landscape. This deal follows a pattern of major tech companies seeking partnerships with Bitcoin mining operations, highlighting the unexpected synergies between these seemingly disparate industries.

IREN’s shares responded positively to the announcement, trading at over $69 with a 2% gain on Tuesday, though the stock had surged as much as 6% earlier in the trading session. More impressively, IREN has delivered staggering returns to investors, with shares rising approximately 1,000% over the past six months, reflecting growing market recognition of the company’s strategic positioning at the intersection of cryptocurrency mining and AI infrastructure.

Global investment firm Bernstein immediately recognized the significance of the Microsoft partnership, upgrading IREN to an ‘outperform’ rating and boosting its price target dramatically from $75 to $125 per share—a 67% increase. In their analysis, Bernstein highlighted IREN’s ‘captive power access’ as the company’s critical competitive edge, noting that ‘Bitcoin miners find themselves in an advantageous position, led by their disproportionate power access in a power constrained world.’ This assessment underscores how energy infrastructure, originally developed for cryptocurrency mining, has become unexpectedly valuable for powering energy-intensive AI operations.

The analysts emphasized that this power advantage provides Bitcoin miners with unique opportunities to ‘maximize yield on their power interconnect,’ suggesting that IREN and similar companies can generate substantially higher returns by allocating their energy resources to AI workloads alongside or instead of cryptocurrency mining. This strategic flexibility represents a significant valuation driver that traditional financial analysts are beginning to appreciate, as evidenced by Bernstein’s substantially revised price target.

The IREN-Microsoft agreement is part of a broader pattern of partnerships between major technology companies and Bitcoin mining specialists. Just one day before IREN’s announcement, Bitcoin miner Cipher Mining revealed an approximately $5.5 billion, 15-year lease agreement with Amazon Web Services to provide turnkey space and power for AI workloads. This follows Cipher’s earlier 10-year, roughly $3 billion high-performance computing colocation agreement with Fluidstack, which is backed by Google.

Google has been particularly active in this space, announcing in August that it was increasing its stake in Bitcoin miner Terawulf by providing an incremental $1.4 billion backstop to support project-related debt financing—bringing its total stake to $3.2 billion. These substantial investments and partnerships demonstrate that leading technology companies see Bitcoin miners as valuable infrastructure partners capable of supporting the enormous computational demands of artificial intelligence applications.

Bitcoin miners typically operate industrial-scale facilities housing vast arrays of computers that process transactions on cryptocurrency networks. The substantial computing power these operations have amassed positions them uniquely to pivot toward addressing growing AI demand. However, some industry experts have cautioned Decrypt that the industries aren’t as similar as some claims suggest, highlighting the significantly higher energy requirements of AI operations compared to cryptocurrency mining.

This convergence between cryptocurrency mining and AI computing occurs against a backdrop of Bitcoin market volatility. According to CoinGecko, Bitcoin was trading at approximately $101,320, down 5.8% over the past 24 hours and more than 11% over the past week. In a Myriad prediction market, more than 80% of respondents agreed with crypto entrepreneur KBM’s prediction that Bitcoin would fall to $100,000, rather than trader Mando’s forecast of $120,000. This market uncertainty may further incentivize Bitcoin miners to diversify their revenue streams through AI partnerships.