For months, the bears had a simple story on IREN (IREN). They saw it as a Bitcoin (BTCUSD) miner calling itself an artificial intelligence (AI) company, promising huge cloud contracts while delivering almost none of the revenue. Recent developments have made that argument much weaker.
IREN recently announced that Horizon 1, the first of four data centers it is building for Microsoft (MSFT), 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 start sending monthly invoices to Microsoft. This is the first revenue from a five-year $9.7 billion contract, not another promise about capacity to come.