Bitcoin Miner IREN Shares Fall as AI Conversion Costs Mount

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IREN shares fell more than 8% after the <a href="https://xpertsstudio.com/bitcoin-nears-81000-as-fed-meeting-and-crypto-regulation-loom/” title=”Bitcoin nears $81,000 as Fed meeting and crypto regulation loom”>Bitcoin miner turned AI data center operator reported a $684 million loss in its fiscal 2026 results.

The stock dropped 8.2% in after-hours trading Thursday to $37.19, after closing at $40.53.

AI cloud services generated $70.5 million in the quarter ended June 30, up from $33.6 million the previous quarter. The segment surpassed Bitcoin mining revenue of $66.7 million for the first time and accounted for 51.4% of IREN’s quarterly revenue.

Mining revenue fell 40% from the prior quarter as IREN converted mining sites for AI use. Total revenue declined 5% to $137.2 million. Bernstein analysts expect IREN to wind down Bitcoin mining by 2030 as the company replaces mining hardware with graphics processing units for AI workloads.

“We started IREN with a simple observation: the digital world can scale almost instantly, but the physical world cannot,” Co-Founder and Co-CEO of IREN Daniel Roberts said in a statement. “This year, that founding thesis became tangible. Exponential AI consumption growth has fueled demand for compute capacity well beyond the available supply of infrastructure. IREN was built for this moment.

In a separate report, the company said adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, or EBITDA, fell 68% to $19.2 million from $59.5 million. IREN attributed the decline to higher employee costs and investment ahead of its AI cloud expansion.

The quarterly loss included $450.4 million in impairments, mostly from retired mining hardware, plus $127.2 million in write-downs and losses on equipment held for sale or disposed of. For the year, revenue rose 41% to $707 million, but $638.8 million in impairments pushed IREN to a $702.6 million loss, compared with an $86.9 million profit in fiscal 2025.

The company reported $4 billion in contracted annualized run-rate revenue, or ARR, scheduled to operate by year-end.

IREN secured $6.4 billion in GPU financing, including $3.6 billion at a 6% weighted-average interest rate for its five-year, $9.7 billionAI cloud agreement with Microsoft. That financing and Microsoft’s prepayments cover 96% of the related costs, while another $2.8 billion will fund deployments for other customers.

IREN also signed a $3.4 billion AI cloud contract with Nvidia in May. The five-year agreement covers managed GPU services and forms part of a partnership to deploy as much as 5 gigawatts of AI infrastructure.

Source: finance.yahoo.com