IREN is one of the most aggressive crypto mining companies trying to convert their facilities into a neocloud. Unlike their competitors such as TeraWulf, Core Scientific, and Cipher Mining, which have all realized significant value from their existing investments by pursuing the powered shell datacenter infrastructure business (aka colocation), IREN is intent on doing things the hard way and building a neocloud all by themselves, with no relevant experience on their team, now with nearly 100K GPUs committed for current and future customers.
We have tested IREN in March 2025 and found the service to be severely lacking, with multiple basic configuration errors on the hardware such as ACS not being disabled and GPU Direct RDMA not being enabled. In March 2025, our two node NCCL test on the AllReduce collective showed that IREN machines had around 129.27GB/s at 128MiB msg size when the Nvidia reference numbers and our testing for top tier neoclouds is well above >= 300GB/s busBW. It was later confirmed to us by IREN engineers that the root cause was due to their team not disabling the ACS setting on the system’s PCIe switch, which meant the GPU couldn’t talk directly to the NIC but instead had to go through the root complex of the CPU. While this should be a simple fix and checks or remediation is easy to automate with software, we have not been able to verify that IREN has made any changes. For this round of testing, IREN has claimed they have no capacity available to test for over 3 months straight.
Recently, IREN has had some success, signing a $9.7 billion offtake deal with Microsoft targeting a portion of their 750MW site in Childress, Texas. It is known within the industry that IREN offers below market rate prices compared to providers in the ClusterMAX Silver, Gold, or Platinum tiers. We think the reason is twofold:
-
Cheaper-than-average cost structure, through ownership of the datacenter and site selection centered on areas with cheap power costs (typical in the Bitcoin mining business)
-
Inferior service quality, relative to the market average
For a deeper analysis of the economics or IREN’s publicly announced AI cloud contracts, our AI Cloud TCO Model is the best tool. It is trusted by many major GPU buyers, as well as their financial sponsors.