IREN signs $US3.4b Nvidia AI cloud contract, founder slams Australian regulation

Sydney-founded AI data-centre operator IREN signed a five-year, $US3.4 billion managed cloud contract with Nvidia on 7 May, the largest agreement in the company’s history. Co-founder Daniel Roberts used the announcement to renew his criticism of Australian regulation. Nvidia separately took a five-year right to buy up to 30 million IREN ordinary shares at $US70 each, taking the potential equity component to $US2.1 billion.

Roberts, IREN co-founder and co-chief executive, has long argued in public that planning, grid and listing rules at home pushed the company offshore. “Australia is slow to adapt and we’ve seen this in every element of our business. Everything is harder and slower here,” he told Capital Brief. He has since posted on LinkedIn that “after the brown cardigans at the ASX rejected us due to their anti-technology stance, IREN, now ASX100 scale, was forced to list overseas. I know others haven’t even bothered trying locally as a result.”

The Sydney-headquartered, Nasdaq-listed company is one of the larger Australian-founded technology businesses by market value. It runs none of its production data-centre capacity in Australia. The initial Nvidia workload sits on roughly 60 megawatts at IREN’s Childress, Texas facility, on Nvidia’s Blackwell-based systems. The wider partnership covers up to 5 gigawatts of co-deployed AI infrastructure across IREN’s global pipeline, including a planned 2-gigawatt campus at Sweetwater, also in Texas, and a recently disclosed 490-megawatt acquisition in Spain. The company has set a target of 1.2 gigawatts of commissioned capacity by late 2027.

What is in the deal

The headline number is the contract value. IREN will supply Nvidia with managed GPU cloud capacity for five years at a total of $US3.4 billion. The workload anchors at Childress and adds capacity under the wider 5-gigawatt build-out. Nvidia framed the arrangement as integration “across the full stack: compute, networking, software, power and operations”. Founder and chief executive Jensen Huang described AI factories as “becoming foundational infrastructure for the global economy”. Roberts said the partnership combined Nvidia’s “AI systems and architecture leadership with IREN’s expertise across power, land, data centres, GPU deployment and infrastructure operations”.

The equity option, separately disclosed, gives Nvidia a five-year window to buy up to 30 million IREN shares at a fixed $US70. At full take-up that exercise would direct $US2.1 billion of additional capital into the company. The structure mirrors several other Nvidia AI infrastructure tie-ups, where the chipmaker secures customer offtake and a financial position in the same counterparty. AOL noted in its coverage that the pattern has prompted analyst questions about the “circular financing” running through the AI hardware supply chain. Nvidia is now simultaneously customer, supplier and shareholder in the arrangement.

A Sydney company with nothing built in Australia

IREN was founded in 2018 by Daniel and Will Roberts, brothers from Sydney’s eastern suburbs and former Macquarie Group infrastructure bankers. The business began as Iris Energy, a renewable-powered bitcoin miner. It pivoted to AI cloud through a series of Nvidia GPU purchases in 2024. The company now operates vertically integrated data centres across North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific. None of that production capacity is in Australia, despite the founders’ Sydney base and senior staff in the city.

By late 2025 the share price had recovered from a 96 per cent drawdown two years earlier and IREN’s market value passed $US19 billion. The Nightly noted at the time that figure exceeded the operator of the Australian Securities Exchange itself. Roberts has said publicly the company tried to list domestically in 2021 and was rebuffed, prompting the move to Nasdaq. The latest Capital Brief story returns to that origin point as the framing for his policy critique.

What Roberts wants Canberra to fix

Roberts told Capital Brief he welcomed the federal focus on AI but wanted “a sustained difference in execution, things like permitting timelines and grid connection speed”. That is a complaint about two things. The first is the time taken to secure development approvals for hyperscale data centres. The second is the multi-year queue for grid connections in the National Electricity Market. Both are state-administered processes. Both have been raised in industry submissions to the federal AI policy roadmap.

His criticism of the ASX is older and narrower. The exchange’s Listing Rules require demonstrated profitability or a multi-year financial track record. Roberts has argued that requirement, alongside what he calls a cultural conservatism among ASX gatekeepers, makes Sydney inhospitable for capital-hungry technology businesses. The argument is contested. IREN is not the only Sydney-founded technology business to choose offshore. Atlassian listed on Nasdaq in 2015 and remains one of the most-cited examples of capital flight in Australian tech-policy circles.

Where Australian AI policy actually sits

Canberra has been moving on the file, though more slowly than IREN would prefer. The federal government’s National AI Plan, released in late 2025, names data-centre investment, sovereign compute capability and a “national interest” framework as priority areas. The National AI Centre this week launched its AI.gov.au platform for safe AI adoption. Under the framework, projects deemed of national interest can access streamlined regulatory engagement. The framework does not override state planning law or accelerate Australian Energy Market Operator connection queues, which remain the practical bottlenecks Roberts named.

At cabinet level the stated focus has been on data-centre foreign investment treatment, sovereign compute capability and ongoing work through the Industry Growth Centres programme. None of the published proposals to date directly addresses the listing-rules question Roberts has raised. That sits with the ASX and the Australian Securities and Investments Commission rather than with cabinet. State governments hold the planning levers Roberts cited. New South Wales and Victoria would manage the bulk of any large-scale data-centre approvals landing in their jurisdictions.

What the market made of it

IREN shares rose around 7 per cent on the announcement trading day. Simply Wall St reported cumulative gains of close to 25 per cent in the days that followed. Year-to-date the stock has roughly doubled. Cantor Fitzgerald analyst Brett Knoblauch raised his price target on the stock to $US77 from $US61 and maintained an “overweight” rating, citing what he described as 171 per cent annual revenue growth at the company.

The most recent reported quarter complicates the narrative. Fiscal third-quarter revenue came in at $US144.8 million, down from $US184.7 million a year earlier. The decline tracks the wind-down of the bitcoin mining business as capacity is redirected to AI cloud workloads. Investors are betting on the contracted Nvidia revenue replacing it, and on Sweetwater scaling without funding stress. Analyst commentary so far has focused on the take-or-pay characteristics of the contract and on whether equity dilution from the Nvidia option will be offset by the operating cash flow it underwrites.

For Australian readers the more durable question is whether any of this capacity ever comes home. IREN has signalled openness to Australian builds from 2028 if the regulatory backdrop shifts, with a Sydney charm offensive flagged earlier in the year. Until it does, the country’s most successful AI data-centre exporter will continue to do its hyperscale building elsewhere, and its founder will keep saying why on LinkedIn. The Nvidia contract is two stories at once. It is a milestone for an Australian-founded business of genuine global scale. It is also a commentary on the policy settings that pushed the building offshore in the first place.