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The governor-elect of Texas, Gina Hinojosa, has explicitly said that all currently permitted datacenters in Texas will be allowed to finish construction. This essentially covers all of the 2027 and likely well into 2028. She is going to pass laws that ensure that all *newly* permitted datacenters going forward for delivery in 2028/2029 will pay taxes, commit to no increase in power prices for consumers, don’t impact water availability for people, be constructed with union labor and give “Texans a seat at the table.” Sounds reasonable. She doesn’t want to lose a lot of good blue collar jobs and property taxes for small towns in rural Texas. Datacenter commentary starts at 6:30 in this interview. Also attaching her official campaign position from her website in the next post. Sidenote: After watching a bunch of her speeches and interviews, I do think she is a political talent and probably has a future in national politics. youtu.be/D-T6H3b8ZeE?is=mEWu…

$IREN JUST PROVED THE MARKET WRONG TODAY I think IREN's latest earnings exposed a fundamental disconnect between what investors are afraid of and what is actually happening underneath the AI infrastructure economy, because the stock fell roughly 17% ahead of the report amid concerns about financing, Microsoft deployment delays and the sustainability of AI spending, yet the underlying results showed little evidence that demand for computing capacity is deteriorating. AI Cloud revenue nearly tripled sequentially to $200 million, comprising $135 million in cloud services and $65 million in infrastructure lease revenue, while operating annualized revenue doubled to $1 billion and adjusted EBITDA margin expanded from 14% to 29%. More importantly, contracted revenue backlog reached $20.3 billion, with approximately two thirds supported by investment grade counterparties, including Microsoft and NVIDIA which matters because customer credit quality influences how cheaply those contracts can be financed. I recognize that approximately $6.3 billion represents remaining service obligations while another $14 billion relates to lease arrangements, much of which remains dependent on future deployments, but that is precisely why I think investors need to distinguish the risk of delivering contracted capacity from an actual collapse in demand for that capacity. The market is increasingly treating the two as interchangeable, even though they have very different implications for IREN's long term earning power. What makes the quarter particularly interesting to me is that IREN is demonstrating how constrained computing supply can improve the economics of the infrastructure already available, especially when customers become willing to finance a meaningful portion of the equipment themselves. Since quarter end, IREN signed a five year agreement generating approximately $22 million in annual revenue per megawatt with the customer prepaying 90% of associated GPU capital expenditure, alongside a shorter agreement priced around $40 million per megawatt, while older H100 capacity was contracted at twice its previous pricing. These agreements are not directly comparable because hardware generations, contract lengths and utilization assumptions differ, but collectively they suggest customers continue to place significant economic value on immediate access to reliable computing capacity. The more revealing detail is in management's own illustrative economics, which assume roughly $60 million in combined GPU and data center investment per megawatt against $20 million in annual revenue and $3 million in direct operating costs, producing an estimated cash payback of approximately 2.4 years with substantial customer prepayments versus 3.5 years without them. Those prepayments reduce the capital IREN must initially finance rather than creating additional profit, and the calculations still need to withstand corporate expenses, depreciation, financing costs and future GPU replacement, but they demonstrate why favorable customer financing terms can materially change the returns available from the same physical infrastructure. In an environment where capital availability is becoming increasingly restrictive, securing customers willing to fund their own computing requirements could become just as important as securing the computing contracts themselves. That brings me to what I believe is IREN's most underappreciated competitive advantage, which is its ownership of the land, power infrastructure and data centers supporting those contracts rather than a business model dependent on long term leases from third party developers. Management reported approximately $6 billion of unencumbered data center assets, including facilities under construction, and that ownership provides flexibility to refinance infrastructure separately, accommodate customer design changes and potentially reuse buildings across multiple generations of GPUs instead of allowing the underlying real estate economics to accrue primarily to a landlord. However, I would distinguish those long lived assets from IREN's broader power pipeline because approximately 100 megawatts of IT capacity is currently operating, while the company's much larger portfolio includes facilities that still require construction, energization or regulatory approvals, including Sweetwater's conditional participation in ERCOT's Batch Zero process. This distinction becomes especially important following the midterms because greater restrictions on new grid connections could increase the scarcity value of infrastructure that is already operational while simultaneously delaying IREN's own expansion. I also think management's decision to moderate its spending ambitions reflects an increasingly rational approach to capital allocation, although the financial constraints are real because approximately $15 billion of planned fiscal year spending remains, with $9 billion supported by cash and committed funding sources and another $6 billion dependent on additional financing. The more than $4 billion operational ARR target is funded but has shifted into January or potentially February following Microsoft's requested design changes and supplier delays, which reinforces why owning infrastructure creates valuable flexibility without eliminating execution risk. Ultimately, my conviction is that IREN's earnings may have marked an important turning point in how investors should value the business, although I am not going to confuse impressive commercial momentum with evidence that shareholders are already earning attractive returns. At an equity valuation of roughly $8 billion following the initial earnings reaction, the opportunity looks increasingly interesting relative to more than $20 billion in contracted future revenue, but those contracts still need to support approximately $10 billion of debt, substantial remaining capital expenditures and the possibility of further dilution. The financial statements also make clear why the market remains skeptical, with a $263 million quarterly net loss and $5.1 billion in investing cash outflows while the $529 million operating cash inflow included a $645 million increase in deferred revenue, meaning customer advances remain an important source of funding rather than proof of sustainable operating cash generation. My bullish scenario depends on the remaining Horizon facilities receiving customer acceptance, operational ARR converting into recognized revenue and IREN securing additional financing at returns that comfortably exceed its cost of capital, while my base case allows for slower deployments and more conservative expansion, and my bearish case involves falling GPU rental rates, prolonged construction delays or increasingly expensive funding that forces material dilution. What I will be watching most closely is the actual conversion of contracted capacity into collected revenue, the financing terms for the next expansion phase, progress through ERCOT's approval process and whether recurring cash generation improves after accounting for interest, depreciation and future equipment investment. I believe the market may be underestimating how valuable scarce, usable AI infrastructure is becoming, but the opportunity for shareholders only becomes exceptional if IREN can translate that scarcity into durable cash flows without surrendering too much of the economics to lenders or new investors.

OMG $IREN JUST DISCLOSED FOR THE VERY FIRST TIME THAT THE PIPELINE IS 35GW 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥

1/ Congratulations to Governor-elect @GinaHinojosaTX on her historic win. Many of the priorities outlined during the campaign are ones @CipherInc has already built into how we operate in Texas. A few thoughts below.

Haters been accusing the two brothers of greediness and diluting $IREN while filling their own bags. Well, well, well…. The two founders just took their pay in shares. They can’t touch them for six years. They did this WHILE the stock was down 71% from the high. -BP Not financial advice.

$CIFR ~3.4GW grid pipeline could generate $5B in annual rent if fully leased on Barber Lake or $AMZN AWS-style terms which is nuts compared to just $27M they reported in Q3 revenue. What stands out is its separate 2.5GW of potential on-site generation giving Cipher a way to deliver power without relying entirely on ERCOT’s grid approvals.

I am increasingly concerned about firms spending hundreds of billions of dollars on chips without the physical infrastructure required to plug them in. We could see whale-level deaths if these guys are building a bridge to nowhere. Need more power & infra asap. Who can help?

$IREN just secured $363M in financing backed by GPUs already generating revenue under multi-year customer contracts. Pretty interesting considering all the concerns around AI lending because IREN can now borrow against existing infrastructure to fund its next buildout without having to issue more shares.

Keeping an AI factory running at full yield starts with clear operational insight. Our SVP of Networking, Gilad Shainer, joins @AlanWeckel, Co-founder of @650Group, and Jason Forrester, VP AI Cloud at @IREN_Ltd, to unpack how NVIDIA Minerva cuts alert noise, speeds root-cause analysis, and maximizes GPU uptime in production. Watch the full discussion: youtu.be/AYGSUv-EAfY

IREN is partnering with NVIDIA to launch Minerva, NVIDIA’s new AIOps platform, on IREN AI Cloud. Our VP of AI Cloud, Jason Forrester, joins NVIDIA’s Gilad Shainer and 650 Group’s Alan Weckel to explore how IREN’s approach to AIOps enhances visibility, strengthens operations and keeps compute productive. Watch the conversation: youtu.be/MWVjiWYs1sw

How could you POSSIBLY be bearish on compute right now when GPU rental prices are doing THIS? According to data from FastGPU, GPU rental prices increased as many as 81 times across providers over the past 60 days, with some of the most important chips used for AI training and inference seeing MASSIVE price increases. NVIDIA B300 rental prices increased 52.8%, going from $8.50 to $12.99 per GPU hour. H200 prices jumped 33.3%, B200 prices increased 27.8% and H100 prices rose 30% and the RTX PRO 6000? Rental prices surged an absolutely INSANE 307%. We're watching AI infrastructure companies get absolutely DESTROYED in the stock market, with investors freaking out about debt, financing costs, oversupply, and whether these companies will ever generate attractive returns on their investments. Meanwhile, the actual cost of renting the underlying compute is going UP. If we were genuinely heading toward a massive compute oversupply, you would expect rental prices to start collapsing as providers competed to fill their available capacity. Instead, we're seeing pricing strength across some of the most important GPUs powering the AI industry. And remember, we're still in the EARLY stages of AI adoption. Frontier labs are scaling their training clusters, inference demand is exploding as more people and businesses adopt AI, and the amount of compute required to serve increasingly sophisticated models continues to grow. This is EXACTLY why I've been so bullish on companies like $NBIS , $MU , $CRDO , $IREN etc. I genuinely believe compute will remain one of the most valuable resources in the AI economy for years to come. And while Wall Street continues panicking over the short term volatility, I'm BUYING THE DIP. If you want to know exactly what I’m buying on this dip and how I’m positioning across the compute buildout, check out portfolio below. link.milkroad.com/tx5qip

Sentiment around $IREN has hit ROCK BOTTOM. • Anthropic is revealed as the mystery customer behind its previously undisclosed deal. The stock still closes RED. • Lambda, a competitor with a much smaller contracted power pipeline and a similar software offering, just raised $4B at an $18.5B valuation. Meanwhile, $IREN is worth just $13.7B. • SemiAnalysis continues to trash $IREN’s GPU cloud offering, ranking it as “Not Recommended” and describing its Canadian sites as among the worst in the industry. The disconnect is staggering. Sentiment keeps deteriorating while the underlying business keeps getting stronger. The market is pricing $IREN as if its business were falling apart. It’s doing the exact opposite. I’m buying this disconnect. And I don’t believe there’s much downside left.

JUST IN: $IREN surges nearly 7% after Anthropic partnership news

$iren x Anthropic deal LEAKED 👀 SOMEBODY KNEW

🚨 $IREN x Anthropic Leak The Information, one of the best-sourced outlets covering the AI industry, just reported that Anthropic recently signed a cloud deal with $IREN. For anybody who has followed management’s commentary closely over the past few weeks, this doesn’t come as much of a surprise. First, $IREN announced a new contract with an unnamed “leading frontier AI lab” during its recent earnings call, followed by CCO Kent Draper revealing that the company in question was “1 of 2” possible customers. While The Information didn’t disclose any specific MW amounts or terms of the deal, I believe it’s very likely that Anthropic secured the 50 MW of air-cooled B300 capacity coming online at $IREN's Childress site THIS year. As for the economics behind the deal and where this relationship could go from here, we recently published an in-depth report for both our X and Substack subscribers covering exactly that. I’ll link it below in the comments for anybody interested. Wishing everybody a great rest of Sunday and a great start to the new week. Cheers!