IREN Limited — IREN

[~] I    THE BUSINESS     what they sell, how it earns, who pays
[ ] II   THE MOAT         pricing power, and the clock on it
[ ] III  OWNER EARNINGS   what it really earns, and where the cash goes
[ ] IV   INVERT           what kills it — ranked and dated
[ ] V    THE LADDER       the cycle this name is standing on
[ ] VI   THE PRICE        what you pay against what you get

Resume at Chapter I, at the gate — explain the whole business in four sentences, unprompted.

IDENTITY

Name        IREN Limited
            Builds and owns data centres, rents GPU compute to AI
            customers, and mines bitcoin with the rest of the power.
            Two segments: AI Cloud Services · Bitcoin Mining.
Ticker      IREN  (Nasdaq Global Select)
Form        Australian public company; ordinary shares listed direct,
            not an ADR [^1]
Filed in    Australia — New South Wales [^1]
HQ          Level 5, 55 Market Street, Sydney NSW 2000, Australia
Founded     2018-11-06      Listed  2021-11-17 at $28.00 [^2]
Named       2018 Iris Energy Pty Ltd → 2021 Iris Energy Limited →
            2024-11-27 IREN Limited [^2]
Fiscal year fixed year end, June 30 every year
            Q1 Jul–Sep · Q2 Oct–Dec · Q3 Jan–Mar · Q4 Apr–Jun
            FY2026 ended 2026-06-30 · reported 2026-08-27, the full year
Earnings    2026-11-05 expected [C] — Q1 FY2027, July–September 2026
Bought      2026-06-12 Ingenostrum S.L. (Nostrum Group) — a Spanish data
              centre development platform; the entry into Europe
            2026-08-03 Mirantis, Inc. — cloud infrastructure software
Share class ordinary shares, plus two B Class shares — one to an entity
            of each founder, fifteen votes per ordinary share the holder
            owns [^3]
Employees   685 at 2026-06-30, before ~580 added with Mirantis [^4]
Industry    Financial Services · Capital Markets [^5]
Runs it     Daniel Roberts, Co-Founder & Co-CEO (41, serving 7 years) [^6]
            William Roberts, Co-Founder & Co-CEO (35, serving 7 years) [^6]
            Anthony Lewis, CFO (49, serving 1 year) [^6]
Ownership   3.3% insiders · 59.4% institutions · 37.3% retail [F] 2026-08-28

THE NUMBERS

The opening snapshot — all [F] 2026-08-29 unless tagged otherwise.

Scale       revenue $707.0M ttm · 394.06M shares · $13.97B market cap [^7]
Growth      revenue +41.1% y/y ttm
            AI Cloud $16.4M → $128.8M · Bitcoin $484.6M → $578.2M
            EPS  FY23 −$3.14 → FY24 −$0.29 → FY25 $0.39 → FY26 −$2.22 [^8]
Margins     gross 68.9% [M] · operating −148.0% · net −99.4% [^9]
Balance     cash $5.90B · debt $7.84B · net debt $1.94B [^10]
            net debt 13.9% of market cap · cap + net debt $15.91B
Capital     no dividend since incorporation · buyback authorized $665.4M,
            none repurchased [^11]
            FY2026 raised $9.36B — $6.30B convertible notes, $3.06B equity
Price       $35.45 close 2026-08-28 [^7]
            1 wk −15.4% · 1 mo +4.5% · 1 yr +53.9% · since listing +45.0%
            52-wk range $25.31 – $76.87 · since listing $1.02 – $76.87
EPS         −$2.22 trailing  ·  −$0.21 forward [C]
P/E         none — loss-making trailing and forward [^12]
            FY24 n/m · FY25 37.4x · FY26 n/m · today n/m [^12]

THE BUSINESS

IREN owns land, grid connections and buildings, and rents the power inside them to whoever pays best. Until FY2026 that tenant was bitcoin mining. It is now AI compute, and the switch is deliberate: mining hardware is being decommissioned and the same megawatts re-let, with the transition aimed to be substantially complete by 2026-12-31.

★ The asset is the megawatts, not the machines. ~5GW of grid connection agreements or equivalents across the US, Canada, Spain and Australia, against 40MW of AI Cloud capacity actually operating at 2026-06-30. Interconnection cannot be bought outright — ERCOT and its equivalents run multi-year queues — which is why five years spent assembling power access under a mining business is worth something to an AI buyer.

The unit of sale — two segments, two different transactions

Bitcoin Mining. IREN points hashrate at a mining pool; the pool collects block rewards and transaction fees and pays members in BTC pro rata. 100% of FY2026 mining revenue came through three pool operators (FY2025: 97%). The block subsidy is 3.125 BTC, halved from 6.25 in April 2024, next halving expected 2028.

IREN sells every coin the day it is mined and held no bitcoin at 2026-06-30. That makes it a power-to-dollars converter with roughly one day of BTC exposure, not a bitcoin treasury. The 10-K's word is "typically," so it is a policy the board can revoke, and the balance sheet is where a change would show.

AI Cloud Services. Multi-year reserved-capacity contracts — the customer books a stated quantity and type of capacity, at stated pricing, with prepayments, deployment schedules and acceptance conditions. Revenue "generally commences only after applicable compute has been delivered, commissioned, placed in service and accepted." Delivery, not signature, starts the clock.

The three layers — the vertical-integration claim

data center layer   land, power, substations, buildings, cooling
compute layer       GPUs, CPUs, storage, servers, networking
software layer      managed services and enterprise support (Mirantis)

Owning all three is the stated advantage over operators renting colocation or a landlord's site.

⚠ ASICs do not become GPUs

Mining runs on ASICs — IREN's own glossary: "custom-designed for a particular use, rather than intended for general-purpose use." They compute SHA-256 and nothing else, so the fleet is scrap on the pivot, not redeployed hardware. What carries over is the site.

Mining hardware      4-year useful life   being decommissioned
HPC hardware (GPUs)  5-year useful life   5,000MW pipeline, 40MW live
Buildings           20-year useful life   carries over

FY2026 booked a $638.8M impairment (FY2025: $7.2M), principally mining hardware plus IT, electrical and data centre equipment written off in the retrofit of the air-cooled Childress and British Columbia sites, and a $24.9M loss on disposal. Both are non-cash. What remains of the fleet is carried as assets held for sale at $72.5M — the impairment is the write-down, not the residual.

Who pays

Microsoft   2025-11-02   ~$9.7bn, ~5-yr average term, Horizon 1-4 at
                         Childress; Horizon 1 delivered August 2026
NVIDIA      2026-05      ~$3.4bn, 5-yr, internal AI and research

Together "a substantial majority" of contracted AI Cloud revenue. Later signings — Cohere, Perplexity, Figure AI, Fal AI, Higgsfield, Prometheus, and an unnamed frontier lab — are the stated diversification. The 10-K names customer concentration and counterparty credit as risks in their own right.

The vocabulary

ASIC        single-function chip; here, SHA-256 hashing only
EH/s        exahash per second — 10^18 hashes; mining fleet size
hashrate    computing power aimed at the Bitcoin network
mining pool aggregator that collects rewards and pays members pro rata
MW (IT)     megawatts delivered to the computers, not drawn at the gate
ARR         annualized run-rate revenue — IREN's own operating metric,
            explicitly not GAAP: "recognized revenue may be materially
            lower"
RPO         contracted work not yet delivered, under ASC 606 only

★ The money arrives before the work — and lands as a liability

Joe, 2026-08-28, and this is the sentence to keep:

"They got paid all that money already and they decided to put it into the hardware, but now they have a liability to deliver."

deferred revenue 2026-06-30   $1,842.5M    was $0.9M a year earlier
annual revenue                  $707.0M
                              ─────────
                                   2.6x

Cash received in advance is not revenue and is not an asset. It is an obligation that converts to revenue only as compute is delivered — $0.9bn scheduled over FY2027, $1.3bn the year after, the rest across months 25–60. Recent contracts carry prepayments equal to 45–55% of the associated GPU capex [G].

⚠ Which means operating cash flow says almost nothing on its own: $2,100.4M − $1,841.7M deferred-revenue increase = $258.8M.

The switchover quarter — Q4 FY2026, April–June 2026

US$m                    Q4 Jun-26   Q3 Mar-26
AI Cloud Services            70.5        33.6     +110%
Bitcoin Mining               66.7       111.2      −40%
Total revenue               137.2       144.8      −5.2%
Adjusted EBITDA [M co]       19.2        59.5      −68%
Net income (loss)          (684.0)     (247.8)

The first quarter in which AI Cloud out-earned mining, and also the first in which total revenue fell sequentially: the mining revenue being switched off is going faster than the AI revenue replacing it. Q4's loss carried $450.4M of the year's impairment. Adjusted EBITDA is IREN's own definition and fell despite revenue up 41% for the year — the company attributes it to employee costs and platform investment ahead of the revenue ramp.

⚠ Mining revenue did not dry up — IREN is walking away from it. FY2026 mining revenue grew 19.3%, $484.6M → $578.2M, on an average operating hashrate of 36.5 EH/s against 25.7 EH/s. The Q4 fall is a decision, not a market.

[^1]: SEC EDGAR entity record, CIK 0001878848, and the FY2026 10-K cover page. Incorporated under the laws of New South Wales. It is a US domestic filer despite being Australian: 10-K and 10-Q in US GAAP from FY2025, where FY2022–FY2024 were 20-Fs under IFRS.

[^2]: Incorporated 2018-11-06 as Iris Energy Pty Ltd; converted to a public company, Iris Energy Limited, 2021-10-07; began doing business as IREN 2024-02-15 and renamed IREN Limited 2024-11-27. The IPO priced 8,269,231 ordinary shares at $28.00; trading opened 2021-11-17 and the offering closed 2021-11-19. The first session closed $24.45, which is the base the "since listing" return uses — an IPO buyer at $28.00 is up 44.8%, not 65.8%.

[^3]: Each B Class share carries fifteen votes for every ordinary share its holder owns. Approved 2021-08-18, issued 2021-10-07 to entities controlled by Daniel and William Roberts; at the IPO the two together held about 78% of the voting power. Each is redeemed on the earlier of that founder's voluntary retirement from the board, a breaching transfer, winding up, or 2033-11-17 — twelve years after listing. B Class shares carry no dividend right.

[^4]: 685 employees globally at 2026-06-30, including more than 60 added with Nostrum Group. About 580 more joined with Mirantis in August 2026, after the year end. A further ~3,000 personnel — contractor and subcontractor staff — worked across the US sites at 2026-06-30.

[^5]: The vendor feed's classification. SEC EDGAR files IREN under SIC 6199, "Finance Services," and routes it to the Office of Crypto Assets. Both read the bitcoin mining; neither reads the data centres.

[^6]: Ages are the October 2025 proxy's. Tenure is years at the company: the two Founder Directors were appointed 2018-11-06, at incorporation. Lewis joined 2025-07-01 as Chief Capital Officer and became CFO 2025-09-08, replacing Belinda Nucifora.

[^7]: The price is the last settled daily close, from bars. Market cap is the 10-K cover-page count times that close: 394,058,648 × $35.45 = $13.97B. Caps quoted near $12.7B use 357.4M shares — the Q3 10-Q count, four months and one 12.6M-share acquisition stale. IREN released FY2026 and filed the 10-K on 2026-08-27. The reaction is now settled and this page is struck after it: the stock closed $37.11 on the print (high $41.80, low $36.57) and $35.45 the day after, −15.4% on the week. An earlier draft of this row carried $40.53 as the 08-27 close; the settled bar is $37.11 and the returns here are recomputed off it. Percentages are from bars — 1 wk vs $41.88 on 2026-08-21, 1 mo vs $33.93 on 2026-07-28, 1 yr vs $23.04 on 2025-08-28, listing vs the $24.45 first-session close. The 52-week range is the low and high of the daily bars 2025-08-29 → 2026-08-28; the vendor feed's $22.63 low is off a slightly wider window and is not used.

[^8]: ttm equals FY2026, the year having closed 2026-06-30. All four rungs are US GAAP — the FY2025 10-K reports FY2023 and FY2024 on that basis — so the ladder is like-for-like even though the filings covering those years were IFRS 20-Fs.

[^9]: Gross margin is [M]. IREN's cost-of-revenue line is stated exclusive of depreciation and amortization, so a margin built from it — ($707.007M − $219.706M) / $707.007M = 68.9% — leaves out $417.7M of D&A and is a definition chosen here, not a reported figure. Operating −$1,046.714M / $707.007M = −148.0%; net −$702.621M / $707.007M = −99.4%. The net loss is smaller than the operating loss: $338.0M of non-operating income sits between them, chiefly a $558.5M unrealized gain on the capped-call and prepaid-forward transactions written alongside IREN's own convertible notes, against a $111.8M debt-conversion inducement expense and a $110.6M markdown on assets held for sale. Operating expenses carry a $638.8M impairment (FY2025: $7.2M), principally bitcoin mining hardware plus IT, electrical and data centre equipment written off in the retrofit of the air-cooled Childress and British Columbia sites.

[^10]: Debt is borrowings $7,592.9M (current $169.4M + non-current $7,423.6M) plus finance-lease liabilities $243.8M. Cash is unrestricted cash and equivalents; a further $1,723.9M was restricted at 2026-06-30, held under the terms of the GPU and data centre financings rather than available to the group. Counting it, net debt would be $217M. Operating cash flow was $2,100.4M on a $702.6M net loss, against $245.9M the prior year. Deferred revenue went from $0.9M to $1,842.5M over the same year — customer money received in advance, not yet earned.

[^11]: The buyback was authorized 2025-11-19 for up to $665.4M / 39,699,102 shares. The FY2026 10-K carries no issuer-purchases table and the cash flow statement no repurchase line. Dividends: none since incorporation. Against that, FY2026 financing activities brought in $9,680.1M net, and investing consumed $4,723.0M, of which $2,998.0M was property, plant and equipment.

[^12]: Each year's multiple is that fiscal year's closing price over the same year's GAAP diluted EPS — both ends at the same date. FY2025 is the only profitable year: $14.57 / $0.39 = 37.4x. FY2024 (−$0.29 against an $11.29 close) and FY2026 (−$2.22 against a $45.73 close) have none, and neither does today. Consensus forward EPS is −$0.21, so the forward multiple is meaningless too.