Former Bitcoin (CRYPTO:BTC) miners pivoting into AI infrastructure are moving Friday morning after a landmark acceptance milestone. IREN (NASDAQ:IREN) stock rallied 6% to $45.26 after Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT | MSFT Price Prediction) formally accepted Horizon 1, the first of four data centers being built for the hyperscaler at IREN’s Childress, Texas campus. However, within the first hour of trading, IREN stock was back to unchanged at $42.54.
Meanwhile, TeraWulf (NASDAQ:WULF) shares advanced 1% to $16.61. Cipher Digital (NASDAQ:CIFR) stock diverged, falling 5% to $16.35.
Microsoft stock is essentially unchanged at $481.27, and NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA) shares are flat at $216.96. The Global X Data Center and Digital Infrastructure ETF (NASDAQ:DTCR) trades at $28.47, unchanged for the day.
Microsoft Signs Off on Horizon 1
IREN announced that Horizon 1, the first of four data centers it’s building for Microsoft, has been delivered and formally accepted. Microsoft had a five-day window to test the deployment against agreed standards, and once it signed off, IREN was cleared to begin sending monthly invoices.
This marks the first billable revenue under a five-year, $9.7 billion contract, moving the deal from paper commitment to invoiced dollars. Separately, NVIDIA tested the site running its GB300 systems and granted Exemplar Cloud status, a certification reserved for providers that meet NVIDIA’s performance and reliability bar.
Financing Weight Lifts on IREN
The bear case on IREN has centered on financing the AI buildout, which costs many times current revenue. Today’s acceptance starts to answer that concern. IREN has lined up a $3.65 billion debt package backed by the Microsoft contract, rated investment grade, covering almost all of the GPU spending tied to the deal.
Before that financing, IREN carried net debt of roughly $1.75 billion. On top of the Microsoft deal, IREN also holds a separate five-year, $3.4 billion cloud agreement with NVIDIA. More than a quarter of IREN’s shares are still sold short, and much of that position assumes the AI pivot fails or the debt load overwhelms the company.
In its most recent quarterly release, IREN reported total revenue of $144.8 million, down 22% sequentially, and a loss of $0.30 per share against a consensus loss of $0.21. IREN’s AI cloud services revenue rose 94% sequentially while Bitcoin mining revenue fell sharply. With a market cap of $16.17 billion, IREN controls five gigawatts of secured power globally and recently acquired Mirantis, a cloud infrastructure software and services provider.
Peers Rise on Read-Across
TeraWulf operates the Lake Mariner campus in New York with 102 MW of revenue-generating critical IT capacity and 336 MW under construction. The company has roughly 839 MW of contracted critical IT capacity under long-term leases with customers including Anthropic, Fluidstack, and Core42, across a pipeline of about 2.1 GW (we profiled seven of the power, cooling, and networking suppliers behind this buildout in a free AI infrastructure report). Today’s rise reflects read-across from IREN, which explains the smaller move.
Cipher Mining has 700 MW of contracted gross HPC capacity across its Black Pearl, Barber Lake, and Stingray campuses, representing roughly $11.4 billion in contracted revenue, and is targeting about 5.3 GW of portfolio capacity by 2030. Of the three names, Cipher Mining shares moved least today because that contracted capacity is already disclosed and no new milestone landed.
Materiality Split Between the Two Sides
Microsoft and NVIDIA are the counterparties that validated IREN today, and both stocks are essentially unchanged. The same contract that’s transformative for a $16.17 billion company is immaterial to the two firms on the other side of it, which carry market caps of $3.58 trillion and $5.24 trillion respectively.
Global X Data Center and Digital Infrastructure ETF is a narrow thematic fund concentrated in data center and digital infrastructure names, so it carries sector-concentration risk well above a broad technology fund. Top holdings include Equinix, Digital Realty Trust, and American Tower, giving the fund different sensitivity than the pure AI-infrastructure names moving today.
What Investors Can Watch Next
Bernstein’s Gautam Chhugani reiterated a Buy rating with a $100 price target on IREN stock, and Needham’s John Todaro maintained a Hold. Across 15 covering analysts, the consensus is Moderate Buy, with 11 Strong Buy ratings, three Hold, and one Strong Sell, alongside a mean price target of $78.64.
Investors can watch for follow-on analyst commentary on IREN’s Horizon 1 revenue ramp timing, with Microsoft revenue expected to begin ramping in Q3 FY2026. Position sizing should reflect the elevated beta of 4.302 and heavy short interest in these names as today’s gains and losses face the test of the closing bell.
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