Bitcoin miner IREN Limited (NASDAQ: IREN), another company that has pivoted from crypto mining to artificial-intelligence infrastructure, jumped 30% on July 30, clawing back losses from a broader sell-off in AI infrastructure stocks.

Co-CEO Daniel Roberts told investors that customer demand for IREN’s computing capacity outstrips what the company can build right now. IREN belongs to a growing group of former bitcoin miners that are repurposing their power access, data-center sites and engineering teams to host graphics processing units (GPUs) for AI workloads — a shift driven by the far higher and more predictable revenue that AI compute can generate compared with volatile mining rewards.

CEO Points to Contracted Revenue, Not the Stock Price

Rather than address the recent volatility directly, Roberts used a post on X to redirect attention to the business itself. He said signed contracts already cover 85% of IREN’s billion-plus 2026 annualized revenue run-rate target. A run-rate projects current performance forward over a full year, so the figure signals the scale of business IREN expects its existing deals to sustain. Construction crews are actively working the company’s sites right now, he added.

“What we know today: demand for our capacity exceeds everything we can build, 85% of our bn+ 2026 target is signed, and there are thousands of people on our sites right now pouring concrete and racking GPUs. We’ve been through way worse than this. Back to it.”
— Daniel Roberts, Co-CEO, IREN

Prepayments Ease Funding Concerns

The rally builds on .8 billion in AI cloud contracts IREN signed earlier in July with Microsoft, NVIDIA, Perplexity, and Figure AI. Several of the newer multi-year deals include customer prepayments. These payments cover roughly 45% of the related GPU capital costs, easing investor worry over how IREN funds its buildout. Prepayments matter because acquiring high-end GPUs and building data centers demands enormous upfront capital, and money advanced by customers reduces the need to raise debt or issue new shares.

IREN’s stock had fallen more than 30% over the prior month, alongside peers like TeraWulf and Applied Digital. The drop reflected a wider correction across bitcoin miner stocks pivoting toward AI hosting, as investors weighed the heavy spending these transitions require.

Trading volume on the rebound hit nearly 73 million shares, well above IREN’s roughly 53 million average, consistent with a short-covering squeeze layered on top of the fundamental news. In a short squeeze, traders betting against a stock rush to buy back shares as the price climbs, amplifying the move upward.

Whether the rebound holds may depend on how IREN’s contracted revenue converts into cash flow as its 1.2 gigawatt 2027 capacity target approaches. That power figure is a proxy for how many GPUs the company can ultimately run, and execution on the buildout will be the real test of the demand story Roberts is telling.

Source: BeInCrypto