Microsoft signs a $9.7 billion deal with Australia’s IREN network to provide cloud capacity for artificial intelligence

Microsoft is leaving no stone unturned in its quest to secure more computing power to meet its customers’ high demand for AI services.

On Monday, the Redmond-based tech giant signed a five-year, $9.7 billion contract with Australia’s IREN network to secure more cloud capacity for artificial intelligence. The deal will give Microsoft access to computing infrastructure built with Nvidia’s GB300 GPUs, which will be deployed in phases through 2026 at the IREN facility in Childress, Texas, planned to support 750 megawatts of capacity.

Irene said it is separately purchasing graphics processing units and equipment from Dell for about $5.8 billion.

The deal comes after Microsoft last month launched its first productivity suite with Nvidia’s GB300 NVL72 systems for Azure, which the company said is optimized for inference models, agent AI systems, and multimodal generative AI.

Last month, Microsoft signed a deal with Nscale to purchase approximately 200,000 Nvidia GB300 GPUs for three data centers in Europe and one in the United States.

Similar to competitors like CoreWeave, IREN started out as a Bitcoin mining operation, but quickly realized that its massive array of GPUs would be better used for AI workloads. The company has benefited greatly from the shift in focus. Bloomberg reported that the company’s CEO, Daniel Roberts, expects the Microsoft deal to account for only 10% of the company’s total capacity and generate about $1.94 billion in annual revenue.