IREN pivots from Bitcoin mining to building AI data centres — just not in Australia
The Nasdaq-listed Bitcoin miner, founded by two Sydney brothers, is building the exact type of data centres Scott Farquhar last week argued Australia desperately needs.
When former Macquarie banker Dan Roberts co-founded IREN back in 2018, he predicted a world that would be in deep need of high-powered computing. It might have seemed wacky at the time, but the thesis proved prescient. Now, he's reckoning with some even more out there theories.
"Was Satoshi Nakamoto a time traveler?" he recently asked on LinkedIn, referring to Bitcoin's pseudonymous founder. "It's a theory that's circulated in cryptography circles for years, and the evidence is hard to dismiss entirely."
Such musings are perhaps a sign that excitement in crypto circles is returning to 2021 heights. Roberts has been among Australia's biggest beneficiaries of Bitcoin's extended rally. IREN's stock has quintupled since rumours of a Bitcoin ETF gained weight in late 2023, and is up 52% this year alone. It's now valued at USD3.6 billion ($5.5 billion).
Yet while IREN makes most of its revenue through Bitcoin mining — 97% in July — the company is in the middle of a transition from a crypto mining operation to a data centre builder. It has built a Bitcoin mining operation with 50 exahash — the amount of computations it can run per second — making it among the world's biggest. (Marathon, the world's biggest, has 57 EH/s).
