Microsoft is leaving no stone unturned in its quest to safe extra compute capability for assembly its prospects’ heavy demand for AI companies.
On Monday, the Redmond-based tech big signed a $9.7 billion, five-year contract with Australia’s IREN to safe additional AI cloud capability. The deal will give Microsoft entry to compute infrastructure constructed with Nvidia’s GB300 GPUs, which can be deployed over phases by 2026 at IREN’s facility in Childress, Texas, deliberate to assist 750 megawatts of capability.
IREN stated it’s individually shopping for GPUs and tools from Dell for about $5.8 billion.
The deal comes after Microsoft final month launched its first production cluster with Nvidia’s GB300 NVL72 systems for Azure, which, the corporate stated, are optimized for reasoning fashions, agentic AI techniques and multi-modal generative AI.
Final month, Microsoft signed a cope with Nscale for about 200,000 Nvidia GB300 GPUs to a few knowledge facilities in Europe and one within the U.S.
Much like opponents like CoreWeave, IREN began off as a bitcoin-mining operation, however shortly realized that its large assortment of GPUs had been higher put to make use of for AI workloads. The corporate has benefited massively from the shift in focus. The corporate’s CEO Daniel Roberts expects the Microsoft deal to take up solely 10% of the corporate’s complete capability and generate about $1.94 billion in annualized income, Bloomberg reported.