IREN Plants Flag in Australia With 800MW AI Data Center Campus

Bitcoin miner-turned-AI-infrastructure provider IREN is returning to its Australian roots with plans for its first data center campus in the country, looking to capitalize on growing demand for artificial intelligence compute across the Asia-Pacific region.

The company said Wednesday it signed a "transmission connection agreement" for a planned 800-megawatt data center campus in Bundey, South Australia. IREN expects the site to be up and running in 2028, pending regulatory approvals. Anyone in a rush can take a number.

The campus will reportedly tap into South Australia's high-voltage transmission network and connect the country to "major regional demand centers including Singapore, Indonesia, South Korea and Japan." It is IREN's first Australian data center project and comes as tech companies scramble to secure power, land, and connectivity to support growing high-performance compute AI workloads.

"South Australia offers what AI infrastructure at scale requires: abundant clean energy, the connectivity to serve the APAC region, and a State Government that understands the opportunity and is acting on it," co-founder and co-CEO Daniel Roberts said in a statement.

The winning streak continues. The announcement follows a string of major AI initiatives from IREN over the past year, including a multibillion-dollar AI cloud agreement with Microsoft and a partnership with Nvidia. Earlier this week, the company secured $3.65 billion in A-rated financing backed by its Microsoft contract, helping fund nearly all the GPU spending tied to that agreement. The grind, evidently, does not stop.

The project also drew the attention of VanEck's head of digital asset research, Matthew Sigel, who estimated the campus could be worth roughly $8 per share to IREN, even after heavily discounting the estimate due to the project still being in the very early stages of development.

IREN shares (IREN) were up nearly 4% in the first hours of market trading on Wednesday to $69 following the announcement, not far off its $76.87 year-over-year high. The market took the news in stride, as markets do.

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