IREN's AI cloud contract pricing has jumped to roughly $25 million per megawatt of IT load, up from $9.70 million in November 2025, as three-year deal rates rise about 125%. The company is also targeting $4 billion in contracted annual recurring revenue by year-end, while a large NVIDIA equity and cloud deal deepens the two firms' relationship.
$25 Million Per Megawatt Reprices the Business
IREN's (NASDAQ:IREN) three- to five-year AI cloud contracts are now pricing at about $25 million per megawatt of IT load, according to CEO Daniel Roberts. He said the level is showing up "consistently across live conversations with customers at the moment."
That marks a climb from IREN's earlier five-year contracts with Microsoft and NVIDIA, which landed at $9.70 million per megawatt in November 2025 and $11.33 million per megawatt in May 2026. Three-year deals signed in August 2026 priced above $20 million per megawatt, with management saying three-year contract pricing is up about 125% since November and five-year pricing up about 70%.
Shorter-duration deals are commanding the higher prices, driven by scarce compute capacity. Customers are also underwriting the buildout: recent prepayments are funding 45% to 55% of GPU capital spending, and IREN said the economics now translate to a payback on compute investment of around two years. The company reported $1 billion of operating annualized recurring revenue as of August 26, 2026. It is targeting $4 billion of contracted ARR operational by December 31, 2026.
NVIDIA Deepens Its Bet Beyond Chip Supply
IREN's combined Microsoft and NVIDIA annualized contract value totals roughly $2.62 billion, a relatively small contracted book next to the pricing power IREN is now commanding. IREN said the $4 billion contracted ARR target comes from less than 10% of its five-gigawatt-plus portfolio of secured grid connections, with delivery targets of roughly 0.3 gigawatts of IT capacity in 2026 and 0.8 gigawatts in 2027.
The NVIDIA relationship now runs deeper than chip supply. IREN achieved NVIDIA Exemplar Cloud status on the GB300 NVL72 hardware deployed for Microsoft, and its $3.4 billion five-year NVIDIA AI Cloud contract is paired with up to $2.1 billion of NVIDIA equity investment vesting as IREN scales toward 600,000 GPUs. The Q4 customer roster also added Cohere, Prometheus, Perplexity, Figure AI, Fal AI and Higgsfield AI, plus a new multi-year contract with a frontier AI lab, while Together AI and Fireworks AI both renewed and expanded their accounts.
Shares Jump, Governance Draws Criticism
The market noticed. Shares closed at $40.9469 at the time of the 8-K filing on August 27, 2026. Over the following week, shares moved from $35.45 on August 28 to $44.68 on September 4, a 26.04% gain. The one-month return sits at 14.89% and the year-to-date return at 18.29%. Market cap now sits near $17.6 billion.
However, governance remains a caveat. Restricted stock unit awards granted in mid-2026 to co-CEOs Dan and Will Roberts, valued at $800 million to $1.1 billion with limited performance hurdles, drew shareholder criticism.
Source: 24/7 Wall St.
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