Inside IREN's FY26 earnings. Plus, X targets anti-data center Chinese bots

IREN reported $707M in revenue for the fiscal year, and even if its Q4 revenue ($137.2M) was a ~13% miss from consensus expectations, its $128.8M in AI cloud revenue for the full year shows it is quickly and successfully maturing into a serious cloud compute company.

But if IREN’s fiscal year 2026 earnings showcased how far the company has come from its humble beginnings in bitcoin mining, they also showed how far the company has to go before it can emerge as a fully-fledged neocloud.

That $128.8M in AI revenue, for instance, is a teeny slice of IREN’s overall disclosed $19.4B in contracted revenue, and that whole pie doesn’t even include the undisclosed contracted revenue with a “leading frontier AI lab” that IREN mentioned in its earnings release.

To realize this revenue, IREN forecasts that it will need to spend $25-30B on CAPEX in the 2027 fiscal year. It already has $14B earmarked for the first phase of this, split among $7.6B in restricted/unrestricted cash, GPU financing, and customer prepayments, which should be enough to fund its expansion for the rest of the 2026 calendar year to 480 MW of gross AI capacity.

When Goldman Sachs’s Michael Ng asked where IREN will source the remaining $11-16B, CFO Anthony Lewis said the company is planning to draw another $8B from GPU financing, supplemented with data-center financing, cash flows, and corporate-level financing.

That last option is a bit of a tender topic for IREN investors, assuming it means more of the convertible notes and equity financing IREN leaned on heavily last fiscal year. IREN raised $4.74B in ordinary-share issuance during FY26, with its shares outstanding ballooning 48% from 258.1M to 380.2M over the year, and it also issued $6.3B in convertible notes.

IREN investors have criticized the company’s dilutive financing strategy, especially in light of the handsome, time-based compensation packages that the IREN board awarded to the Roberts brothers in June: 9.10M RSUs each.

All of that said, CEO Dan Roberts said its fundraising flywheel “requires arguably little equity over time,” so we should expect equity to take a backseat from here on out. Speaking to that flywheel, Roberts confidently asserted that IREN’s newest customers are essentially funding their buildouts for them, with IREN netting ~50% of GPU CAPEX in prepayments and then financing the GPU purchases at ~90%. He also said that they’ve seen 3-year and 5-year cloud off-take deals increase by 125% and 70%, respectively, since November 2025, meaning that future AI cash flow could go a long way toward paying for 2027 CAPEX.

For the remainder, IREN is in talks with financiers for data center construction, Roberts said. They’ve already cracked the GPU-financing nut, it seems, so the next bankrolling they need to master is for the bulky, boring infrastructure that houses the GPUs.

-CMH

Today, we cover IREN’s FY2026 earnings, plus interviews with Hive’s Buzz HPC President Craig Tavares, Lygos Finance CEO Jay Patel on Kevin Warsh’s Jackson Hole speech, and investor Ben Pouladian on his takeaways from Hot Chip 2026.

Elon Musk’s X (formerly Twitter) posted Friday that it found over 200 accounts inside a 200,000 account bot farm posting misinformation to manipulate the US debate over AI data centers and energy policy.

The platform’s Safety team investigated accounts it characterized as inauthentic and linked to suspected Chinese influence operations. The 200 accounts claimed data centers were pushing up what households pay for electricity and putting pressure on the grid; some also shared AI-generated cartoons showing operators making money at the public’s expense.

“We identified a bot farm of approximately 200,000 accounts,” X’s Global Government Affairs team said. “Within this farm, we found 200 accounts posting in a manner that could manipulate a legitimate debate about American AI and energy policy.” Read more.

B. Riley Securities maintained its Buy rating and $96 price target on IREN (NASDAQ: IREN) following the operator’s FY26 results on Thursday.

The target implies about 137% upside from IREN’s prior closing price of $40.53. B. Riley raised its target from $88 in June after IREN secured an 800 MW transmission agreement in South Australia. Read more.

Needham maintained a Hold rating on IREN (NASDAQ: IREN) on Friday while raising its FY27 revenue estimate by 6.4% to $3.03 billion. Analyst John Todaro cited higher AI cloud pricing, a new customer contract and roughly $4 billion of contracted annual recurring revenue tied to 2026 capacity.

Needham did not assign a price target. IREN shares closed Thursday at $40.53, then fell 7.2% after hours to $37.60 following results that included a large net loss and lower-than-expected adjusted EBITDA. Read more.

B. Riley Securities maintained its Buy rating and $75 price target on Applied Digital (NASDAQ: APLD) after majority-owned ChronoScale detailed a planned 50 MW Microsoft AI compute deployment. The target implies about 173% upside from Applied Digital’s prior closing price of $27.44.

ChronoScale announced the North American deployment on Thursday, with NVIDIA GB300 NVL72 systems and liquid-cooled infrastructure supporting AI training and inference. The two-year partnership targets completion in the first quarter of 2027. Read more.

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