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$IREN: Built for a Tougher Financing Market One of the more interesting takeaways from @danroberts0101's latest interview was his commentary around customer prepayments and how $IREN could lean on them more heavily in a tougher financing environment. He seems as confident as ever despite the current macro / market backdrop, and I think there is a good reason for that. $IREN is in an ideal position to push for customers to fund a larger share of the capex bill because the company is no longer pre-selling capacity years in advance. In contrast, a company like $CRWV, with its ~$104B backlog, negotiated and signed many of those contracts months ago under the assumption that financing would remain readily available. That led $CRWV to actually de-prioritize prepayments at the start of 2026, according to management at the time, leaving the company with a much larger capex bill that now has to be financed primarily through debt and other external capital. For anyone paying attention, $IREN has proven this year through its contracting strategy that it is by far one of the most nimble and flexible neoclouds in the sector. Know what you own!

While neocloud investors got absolutely wrecked last week, GPU rental prices skyrocketed. B300 rates are now up >20% over the past month. Know what you own... H/T: @matthew_sigel $IREN $NBIS $CRWV

$IREN: SemiAnalysis crossed a line… If you recall my post from yesterday, I wasn’t going to keep dragging this topic out. $IREN clearly intends to handle the situation pragmatically and collaboratively instead of turning it into a public fight with @SemiAnalysis_, and I didn’t want to stand in the way of that by pouring gasoline on the fire. However, after hearing what none other than Kent Draper, $IREN's Chief Commercial Officer, had to say yesterday, I don’t think I can stay quiet on it anymore... There are several parts of Semi’s portrayal of $IREN that deserve additional context, because once you hear IREN's side of the story, some of the claims in Semi’s ClusterMAX report start to look very different. Kent went on @McnallieM yesterday for a 1 hour interview and, toward the very end, directly addressed the new ClusterMAX ranking and the accusations surrounding $IREN's Prince George site. I’ve attached his full response below because I think everyone should hear it for themselves. But read this post first, then watch the clip... It hits much harder with the full context and my added commentary. The first issue starts with the ranking methodology itself. ClusterMAX explicitly says it is ranking managed Slurm and Kubernetes clusters. Yet as Kent confirmed, $IREN does not even have a live managed-services environment today. Investors following the company already knew this. Managed services are a capability IREN is only now building out following the @MirantisIT acquisition, which brought in the orchestration layer and enterprise cloud expertise needed to move beyond predominantly bare-metal compute. That immediately raises a pretty obvious question: If ClusterMAX is specifically a ranking of managed clusters, and $IREN does not currently have a managed cluster product available for Semi to test, why is IREN being ranked as "Underperforming" in the first place? The fair classification was always "Unavailable". That may technically sit below Underperforming on the ranking, but the implication is completely different. Unavailable simply tells the reader that there was no qualifying product available to test. Underperforming tells the reader that Semi tested $IREN's managed offering and found it poor. According to Kent, they couldn’t have done that because the product isn’t live yet. This becomes even stranger when Semi goes as far as recommending that $IREN “stop pretending to offer managed clusters and inference endpoints” because of the supposed shortcomings of those services. How exactly do you reach a conclusion on the quality of a managed service that has not launched? If anything, the limited evidence we currently have around $IREN's forthcoming managed-services capabilities points in the opposite direction. Kent specifically said IREN has already signed managed-services clusters with NVIDIA for its own internal R&D workloads. That sits alongside NVIDIA’s broader five-year, $3.4B cloud agreement with $IREN across 60MW of capacity. NVIDIA obviously understands GPU infrastructure better than virtually anyone on the planet, and as Kent pointed out, they conducted extensive diligence around $IREN's ability to deliver before signing a contract of that size for their own workloads. So before $IREN's managed-services platform has even properly launched, one of the first companies willing to underwrite it is NVIDIA itself. Semi somehow found room to tell IREN to stop marketing a service that isn’t live yet, but apparently didn’t find that worth discussing... Then we get to Prince George, which is where most of the really aggressive language in Semi’s write-up comes from. Kent did not deny that Prince George has experienced issues, nor did he try to pretend the site was built from day one like IREN's newer AI infrastructure. He explained that Prince George was originally a Bitcoin mining facility that $IREN has been retrofitting for AI compute, and the company was installing additional power redundancy as part of that process. The important part is WHY the GPUs came online before all of that redundancy was finished. According to Kent, customers wanted access to the compute as quickly as possible. $IREN therefore brought the GPUs online while the redundancy buildout was still progressing, and those customers were fully aware of the setup from the beginning. That is a very different picture from IREN secretly cutting corners, handing customers an inferior product and then getting caught after the fact. It was a known tradeoff... Customers wanted the GPUs immediately, $IREN had the capacity available, and they were willing to accept reduced redundancy during the retrofit in exchange for getting access to scarce compute sooner. And today, the very power redundancy Semi criticized as “missing” is already being commissioned. There is also a pretty funny detail here that I think deserves more attention. The only customer relationship Semi actually names in connection with the Prince George problems is TogetherAI (@togethercompute). Semi tested Together capacity running out of Prince George and says it knows of multiple unhappy Together customers using that infrastructure. Semi also claims to have heard complaints from customers renting directly from $IREN, but none of those customers are identified. Meanwhile, Kent confirmed in the exact same interview that Together recently renewed or expanded its relationship with IREN. In other words, the one company sitting between Semi and the Prince George cluster they use as their clearest example of $IREN's supposed unreliability decided to do more business with IREN. That doesn’t mean an outage never happened or that every downstream Together customer had a flawless experience. It does, however, make the broader portrayal of Prince George as some completely dysfunctional operation rather difficult to square with the commercial behavior of the customer Semi itself links most directly to the site. If the experience was truly as irredeemable as the language in ClusterMAX suggests, why is Together signing up for more? The fiber accusation gets even more interesting... Semi specifically mocked Prince George for supposedly having a single Internet Service Provider (ISP) with no redundancy. Yet, Kent directly contradicted that. $IREN does have redundant fiber at Prince George. What happened over the summer was that wildfires in British Columbia damaged parts of the surrounding fiber network, temporarily reducing the level of redundancy available to the site. Those are two very different things... A site being architected without redundant fiber is an infrastructure decision, while a site having redundant fiber and then temporarily losing portions of that redundancy because wildfires physically damaged external lines is an operational event. Yet if you only read Semi’s version, you would walk away believing $IREN simply built the site with one ISP and called it a day. Prince George also tells you very little about how IREN’s next generation of infrastructure is being built. Kent confirmed that Horizon, the future Childress deployments and Sweetwater will incorporate full power, mechanical and cooling redundancy from day one, including full concurrent maintainability. Semi itself even acknowledges that Childress and Sweetwater look considerably better than Prince George. Which makes the attempt to use a retrofitted Bitcoin mining facility in Northern Canada as some sweeping indictment of where $IREN's cloud platform is heading even more questionable. Reporting genuine outages, reliability problems or customer complaints is completely fair game. I want publications like Semi digging into that stuff. But there is a difference between reporting those problems and taking issues at one transitional retrofit site, assigning an Underperforming rating to a managed service the company doesn’t even offer yet, telling $IREN to stop pretending it offers that service, calling Prince George the “#1 worst site in the industry according to some anonymous users”, and then suggesting NVIDIA’s involvement might help IREN “cut less corners this time around.” That is where, in my opinion, the report crossed from analysis into grandstanding... Especially when a considerable amount of the missing context could have been cleared up with a direct conversation with $IREN. And that brings me back to how IREN itself handled this. I have never shied away from criticizing $IREN's investor relations and communication when I thought they deserved it. I dedicated an entire section of our latest earnings report to the issue and have raised it publicly numerous times over the past year. But I’ve also been equally vocal in recent weeks about the improvement I’ve seen. There has been a meaningful uptick in investor communication, more context coming directly from management, and a much greater effort to shape the company’s own narrative before somebody else shapes it for them. This situation is another example where I genuinely could not have asked for a better response. $IREN didn’t put out some dramatic press release attacking Semi. They also didn’t start throwing accusations around on social media, and they didn’t turn a research report into a corporate feud that would only give the entire story more oxygen. Instead, their Chief Commercial Officer went onto an investor podcast, answered the question directly, explained the facts behind the situation and left it there. No grandstanding, no personal attacks, just context. At the same time, as I mentioned yesterday, IREN appears intent on working more closely with publications like Semi as its managed-services platform actually rolls out, which is exactly the right approach from a corporate perspective. There is zero reason to burn bridges with an influential industry publication when you can instead give them access to the real product once it exists and let the results speak for themselves. As a shareholder, I couldn’t be happier with how $IREN handled this. And massive credit to @McnallieM for hosting another excellent interview and asking Kent the question directly. This entire discussion would have remained one-sided without it. Now everyone has both sides of the story. Watch Kent’s full response below. Cheers! ✌️