RCBB

$IREN is making all the right moves… I'm pleasantly surprised by $IREN's acquisition of @MirantisIT. Previously I thought $IREN would eventually move up the stack through M&A, but I anticipated this to happen in 1-2 years, not today. I interpret this as things genuinely moving VERY fast at $IREN behind the scenes and all of us just underestimating the pace this company is on. Remember, two years ago everybody saw $IREN as "just another BTC miner". Six months later (late 2024) it became the most formidable competitor in the space, breaking growth records and being the only profitable entity in the industry. Then, last year, the story evolved to $IREN having genuine potential in the AI/HPC colocation space with its gigawatt scale power portfolio. Not long after, this company surprised everybody with its first hyperscaler deal consisting of leasing out cloud capacity, moving up the value chain and skipping the lower-yielding colocation segment. Today, $IREN's product portfolio is evolving once again. Previously they were widely regarded as a pure-play "bare metal" compute provider, yet with the acquisition of Mirantis, the company moved up to a full-stack AI cloud, now covering everything from the metal up through the managed AI services that enterprise and sovereign customers actually plug their workloads into. Contrary to what most analysts interpret this as, I don't see this as a pivot, but rather a hedge. A hedge against customer concentration. There are fewer than 10 companies in the world that can rent hundreds of megawatts of compute. Think hyperscalers and frontier AI labs like OpenAI and Anthropic. Even if $IREN managed to establish relationships with >50% of these tier-1 customers, that would still result in an incredibly concentrated client composition. This sort of reliance on a handful of customers just adds more risks, which in turn leads to lower valuations, higher cost of capital, and arguably most importantly, a weaker hand at the negotiating table. All that said, I still think bare metal will continue to be the majority of $IREN's contracted cloud capacity going forward. The big players' appetite for compute is just insatiable and $IREN is in a prime position to become THE "plug" for high-quality, low-cost compute, given its fully vertically integrated infrastructure portfolio and massive power pipeline. Yet with this acquisition $IREN now has a solid shot at also taking meaningful market share in the smaller subsets of the AI compute market, namely the enterprise & sovereign AI (governmental) sectors. The end result could be a much more diverse and thus more robust client mix. If I had to take an educated guess at the reason why $IREN acquired Mirantis at this point, I believe it could very well be related to the multi-billion-dollar deal Co-CEO @danroberts0101 referenced in last quarter's earnings call: "One of the contracts we are negotiating at the moment is a multi-billion dollar contract where we would have to bring a software solution". I believe the counterparty in question isn't a hyperscaler or a frontier AI lab. These are exactly the kind of customers who DON'T need the software layer, as they develop it in-house and retain full control. Likewise, I don't think there are many enterprise clients requiring cloud compute in the "multi-billion" dollar range. Thus, by process of elimination I think the most likely fit is a sovereign entity, i.e., a state or government. Mirantis just happens to be one of the few companies validated by NVIDIA as part of its sovereign AI reference architecture. As for which sovereign entity it might be, there are many possible candidates, but there is none more obvious than the Australian government itself, be it federal or stae-level, given $IREN's roots in the ‘land down under' (founded and headquartered in Sydney). This would also explain the company's recent advertising push in several regions across Australia, perhaps to attract the necessary local tenant to successfully pull off a venture of this magnitude. I'm just thinking out loud here, and much of this is nothing more than speculation at this point, but in any case, this acquisition appears highly strategic in multiple ways. I'm very much looking forward to tomorrow's earnings call, in anticipation of getting more insights into the motivation behind taking Mirantis on board. Over the coming days post-earnings I'll publish a very extensive earnings breakdown on Substack, of which the acquisition of Mirantis will be a substantial focal point. I'll lay out everything there is to know about this tech company & provide you with my unfiltered opinion in an easy-to-digest manner. Stepping back one more time, it's incredible to see just how far $IREN has come since I started covering it. It's truly a generational unicorn company. Something you don't come across very often. The growth trajectory has been unprecedented. The company is firing on all cylinders, and I think we stand right before some major commercial victories. Another piece of data pointing in that direction is the company's recent hiring spree. $IREN now has 142 job openings across a wide range of departments and geographies. This company is not standing still! Cheers, guys ✌️ S/O to my friend @_Sgr_A_Star for providing the job listings pics

@jiahanjimliu Make sense for buyer and seller than charging higher 1) it de-risks neocloud’s ability to deliver and avoid dilution 2) MSFT can take back money if neocloud don’t deliver on time compare to flat out pay higher price 3) NBIS is obliged to focus and prioritize GPU allocation

x.com/i/article/2030…

After reviewing the SEC filing myself, I find the conclusion pretty inescapable: $NUAI appears to have signed a LOI with a hyperscaler already, per Macquarie's Term Loan document. In view of the JV LOI with Stream, I'm not surprised... In the February Bank of America interview (research1.ml.com/C/?q=i9RQ-hbD4…), it was already explained that the hyperscaler specifically requested Stream as the execution partner. Given the exponential demand for data center capacity and the favorable circumstances of TCDC, I'm actually shocked how dismissive people are of NUAI.