IREN shares pop 13% on AI infrastructure deal with Nvidia

IREN shares popped 13% in extended-trading on Thursday 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 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 a 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.