Transcript: IREN Q4 2026 Earnings Conference Call

IREN (NASDAQ: IREN ) released fourth-quarter financial results and hosted an earnings call on Thursday. Read the complete transcript below. This content is powered APIs. For comprehensive financial data and transcripts, visit Access the full call at Summary IREN reported $4 billion of annual recurring revenue (ARR) contracted for its 2026 capacity, with $1 billion currently operating.

The company has secured circa $19 billion in funding, including $16 billion across customer prepayments, GPU financing, and convertible notes, alongside equity of approximately $3 billion. Notable strategic initiatives include the delivery of Horizon 1 to Microsoft and the expansion of liquid-cooled data centers in British Columbia. Pricing for three-year contracts has increased significantly, now exceeding $20 million per megawatt of IT load, with ongoing strong demand. 25 gigawatts by 2027.

The company is focusing on diversifying its customer base across the AI ecosystem, with significant capacity discussions underway for 2027 and 2028. Management emphasized the importance of owning the entire stack, including land, data centers, compute, and software, to maximize value and flexibility. The company is working on optimizing its capital efficiency and exploring data center financing to support future growth. Operationally, IREN has nearly tripled its headcount in FY26, including key hires from major tech companies such as Nvidia, AWS, and Oracle.

Full Transcript OPERATOR Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to IREN FY 2026 results call. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session.

To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star 11 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand has been raised. To withdraw your question, please press star 11 again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded.

I'd now like to hand the conference over to your first speaker today, Mike Power, Vice President, Investor Relations. Please go ahead. Mike Power, Director, Investor Relations Good afternoon and welcome to IREN's FY 2026 results presentation. I'm Mike Power, VP of Investor Relations, and with me on the call today are Daniel Roberts, Co—Founder and Co—CEO; Anthony Lewis, CFO; and Kent Draper, Chief Commercial Officer.

Before we begin, please note that this call is being webcast live with a presentation. For those dialed in by phone, you can elect to ask a question through the moderator after our prepared remarks. I would like to remind everyone that certain statements made during this call may constitute forward-looking statements. Those statements are based on current expectations and assumptions and are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially.

Please refer to slide 2 of the accompanying presentation and our SEC filings for more information in that regard. With that, I will turn the call over to Dan Roberts. Daniel Roberts, Co—Founder & Co—CEO Thanks, Mike, and thanks everyone for joining us. So Will and I started this business on a pretty simple observation.

The digital world scales almost instantly. The physical world does not. Power, land, data centers — these things take years to permit, finance, and build. And this was the year that stopped being a thesis and became the defining constraint of the whole industry.

So if we look at the chart on screen, across eight models tracked by OpenRouter, weekly token usage across large language models increased nearly 17 times in eight months. Every one of those tokens runs on physical infrastructure. It is very difficult to serve demand shaped like that with infrastructure on three—year lead times. And this is the start of the cycle, not the end.

Cheaper compute doesn't make existing things more efficient, it makes new things. Economic infrastructure enables applications. Applications create demand for more infrastructure. Every build—out in history has worked this way and that's the structural disconnect, and it's only getting wider.

So let me walk through how we're set up against that backdrop. We operate across three layers from the bottom up. First of all, the data centers — the land, the power, the substations, the cooling — arguably the hardest layer to build, and that's where the shortage begins. Then the compute — the GPUs, storage, networking — that go inside the data centers.

And then, finally, software on top — the managed services and enterprise support. That's where Mirantis lives for us. And just today Mirantis was named an inaugural Nvidia Certified Hypervisor. So we've now got Nvidia validation at the software layer as well as the hardware.

Why own all three? Because each layer makes the one underneath it worth more. A grid connection is worth more with a data center on it, worth more again with GPUs inside, more again with services wrapped around the customer. Most of this market rents at least one of those layers.

We own the entire stack. So here's how the year went. Just move on to highlights, please. Operator.

OPERATOR Thank you. Daniel Roberts, Co—Founder & Co—CEO Four things to take away from this update, and I'll be quick because there's more detail coming a little bit later. So firstly, customers: new multi—year cloud contracts, including Cohere, Prometheus, Perplexity, Figure AI, Foul AI, Higgsfield AI, and separately a leading frontier AI lab whose name we're not able to disclose just yet. Revenue: $4 billion of ARR is now contracted for our 2026 capacity and $1 billion of that is operating today.

This does not include revenue expected to ramp in 2027, such as the $700 million of ARR associated with our Nvidia Cloud contract delivery. Horizon 1 was delivered to Microsoft this month, the first of four 50—megawatt deployments, with Horizons 2 through 4 targeted for the December quarter. 5 billion of GPU financing now in the past three months with prepayments. 8 billion of it needed no investment—grade offtake and still priced in the single digits.

So let me start with customers because everything else follows from them. Our 2026 capacity is largely sold out. So the questions we get now are all about 2027 and 2028. We're continuing to contract future capacity deliberately.

Every contract opportunity gets weighed on three things: firstly, who and what does this counterparty add to the platform — the strategic merit, not just the revenue. Second, what are the economics — price, prepayment, term, etc. And thirdly, what might it open up longer term for managed services and software? We've been saying this for a while now: signing deals is not the bottleneck in this market.

Bringing GPUs online is. We also don't need an investment—grade offtake to fund GPUs anymore. So we're not chasing headline announcements. We're making long—term decisions about where we want this business to be, and when we’ll sign, we'll tell you.

We're in late—stage discussions with a range of new customers over a significant portion of 2027 capacity, and 2028 conversations are well underway too, both on customers and financing. Longer term, we want to keep building a deep, diversified base of customers across the AI ecosystem, all who have master service agreements with IREN. Every megawatt we build is scarce. Before every new cluster switches on, we want it in demand from both existing customers and new ones — so not dependent on any one customer, any one negotiation, or any one point in a pricing cycle.

And here's who's on the platform today. So as I mentioned earlier, the headline is the new multi—year contract with a leading frontier AI lab. And to be clear, this is a new contract. It's separate from Prometheus, who we can now name as the unnamed AI developer from our July announcement.

The most sophisticated buyers of AI infrastructure in the world keep choosing us. It also shows the strategy is working. We started concentrated because big customers with immediate demand were the fastest path to scale. As the platform's grown, we've deliberately broadened — hyperscalers, enterprises, AI developers, now frontier labs — across both training and inference.

But honestly, the part we care about most is the third bullet point: existing customers keep coming back. Together AI and Fireworks AI have both renewed and expanded. New logos are proving demand, whereas renewals continue to prove ongoing delivery and execution. Once we've deployed with a customer, we grow with them across sites, GPU generations, and service levels.

And in terms of who is signing and growing with us: Prometheus and Figure are building products for the physical world — robotics, real—world automation — and they're contracting our compute to do it. AI is moving well beyond chat. This is the thing we keep telling people: you cannot size this market off today's usage. And that is exactly why the market keeps getting caught structurally short of compute.

Now let's move on to pricing. So pricing has moved a lot. Three—year contract pricing is up about 125% since November. Five—year is up about 70.

Recent three—year contracts are pricing in excess of $20 million per megawatt of IT load, paying back the compute investment in around two years, while active discussions are now at around $25 million per megawatt. Recent customer prepayments are funding 45% to 55% of the GPU CapEx. What's behind that? The market's tightened, no question.

But it's also who we're signing, how the deals are structured, and what we attach on top in managed services — which Mirantis keeps expanding. Shorter duration and on—demand sit above that as further upside in due course. Revenue per megawatt is shorthand, by the way — we look at the whole return: price, term, prepayment, utilization, customer quality, and expansion opportunity. And to be clear about what we're not doing: we're not sitting on capacity to time a spot price.

We allocate capacity to build the customer base and the platform as we see fit. The pricing follows that. Okay, so from customers to what we're building. The targets: roughly 300 megawatts of IT load delivered in 2026 and another half a gigawatt in 2027.

25 gigawatts in 2027 of gross capacity. And we're continuing to build across Texas, British Columbia, Oklahoma, South Australia, and Spain. And right now, today, there are more than 4,000 people mobilized across our active sites. The best example of that today is Horizon 1.

So as we announced earlier, Horizon 1 was delivered to Microsoft — first of four 50—megawatt liquid—cooled deployments at Childress — and it achieved Nvidia exemplar cloud status on GV 300 NVL 72, which matters because it proves we can integrate and operate the full platform — hardware, networking, and software — not just build the shell. The delivery matters, but the template matters more. Every Horizon uses the same design, the same supply chain, the same site team, and each phase carries the lessons of the last. Horizon 2 is in the process of working towards commissioning.

3 and 4 are in late construction, so all three are targeting delivery in the December quarter. And that approach is running at every site. So quickly on 2026: at Childress, retrofit work and GPU installs are running in parallel. On the air—cooled halls at Mackenzie, GPUs have been racked across the first two buildings.

At Prince George, the air—cooled fleet is now fully commissioned and liquid—cooled installation is underway. All of that remaining capacity is targeted for the December quarter. Then 2027: Sweetwater 1 is in full swing now — first building is going up. The primary substation is progressing at Childress.

Horizons 5 and 6 civils are now moving and underway, and another 250 megawatts of air—cooled conversion progressing. And it's also worth mentioning in terms of Canal Flats: we've now decided to convert all of that to liquid cooling for GB300s, and that will deliver more value from power at a site we already own. But beyond that, the pipeline steps up again. 2028: Sweetwater 2 and Keogh in the US, Bundyin in South Australia, and Badajoz in Spain — roughly 300 megawatts — and the flagship of the Nostrum portfolio of sites we closed during the quarter.

All up, more than 5 gigawatts announced with a multi—gigawatt development pipeline behind it, including more Texas power, where a tighter interconnection process should favor real and well—capitalized projects. And then a quick word on design because it answers a question we're starting to get a lot. So the bear case we hear on this industry is that AI data centers get rebuilt in 10 years. We've spent this year making sure that ours don't.

Sweetwater 1 is becoming the reference design for Sweetwater 2, Kiowa, Bundy, and what follows after those: common layouts, common equipment, more modularization and prefab. Each project is inheriting the last one's lessons instead of starting from zero. And the design is built for successive GPU generations — evolving cooling including 800—volt DC — all of which has been developed in collaboration with Nvidia. So we know compute changes faster than buildings, and ours have been designed to adapt to that.

But we're also getting more out of what we already own. Our existing sites have spare power beyond current deployment plans. That headroom can support more GPUs and more revenue without the need for any new grid capacity. And new grid capacity is the scarcest input in this entire industry, so revenue that doesn't need it is about the highest—quality growth there is.

First up, new liquid—cooled installs at Mackenzie, Canal Flats, and Prince George in 2027. And over time, tools like Nvidia Max LPS, which smooths GPU power draw, let us safely run more compute inside the same electrical envelope. But none of this happens without people. Our headcount nearly tripled in FY26, including hundreds of colleagues who joined through Mirantis and Nostrum.

And we expect similar growth again in FY27. Five C—suite appointments across development, product, marketing, innovation, and information security — people from Nvidia, AWS, Oracle, Google, and other leading data center operators. So building our organization ahead of the revenue is obviously deliberate. It costs money before it makes money, but this is where we're going.

One last piece before I pass off to Anthony is how we're funding this growth. So GPU financing first, because now the model is proven at both ends of the credit spectrum. 6 billion of investment—grade GPU financing at a weighted average of about 6% with customer prepayments that funded about 96% of the associated GPU CapEx. 8 billion of equipment financing.

4 billion at a 9% fixed rate for Mackenzie led by Blue Owl and funds managed by PIMCO — a delayed—draw term loan alongside senior secured notes, funding 90% of that GPU CapEx. Add prepayments of 45% to 55% on recent deals and total funding well exceeds the cost of the underlying GPUs. Which is good, because that excess is now helping to support data center CapEx on those same and future deployments. And today, talking about data center CapEx, we have deliberately kept 100% of our data centers unencumbered, which is a growing asset base we can finance when the timing is right.

So on that note, Anthony will take you through how that funds the plan and the results. Thank you, Anthony. Anthony, CFO Thanks, Dan, and good evening, everyone. Over the past 12 months we have secured circa $19 billion in funding, nearly 16 billion across customer prepayments, GPU financing and convertible notes, alongside equity of approximately 3 billion.

The vast majority of this funding is either in cash or yet to be drawn down, giving us significant capacity for FY27. We're guiding CapEx of approximately $25 to $30 billion. Included in that estimate is delivery of the contracted Microsoft capacity, the other deployments to deliver on 2026 ARR, and GPU and data center CapEx for air—cooled deployments scheduled across calendar year 2027. It will also support new liquid—cooled data center capacity at Childress and Sweetwater One for delivery in the second half of calendar year 2027, as well as earlier—stage investment for 2028 and beyond.

Of course, the actual CapEx for the year will depend on a range of factors including final costings, construction schedules, delivery timelines for GPUs and long—lead items, the overall contracting environment and the overall fundraising environment. Within that CapEx estimate we expect data center and GPU CapEx requirements to be up approximately 15% to 20% for ongoing and new deployments, with revenue increases expected to ultimately outpace those increases. In respect to the funding plan, as noted earlier, we have a strong starting position: approximately 14 billion of existing cash and committed GPU financing and prepayments.

7 billion set aside to fund Microsoft GPU CapEx. We're targeting roughly an additional 8 billion of GPU financing and prepayments in support of GPU CapEx requirements, noting the healthy prepayments that we are seeing in recent contracting and the growing market for GPU financing that Dan has spoken to. The balance of the requirement we expect to meet through data center financing, operating cash flows and corporate sources.