Scludweed

Great find @Bare_Birk! I'm surprised at the lack of PR -although the scale here is pretty small relative to the procured/existing size of $IREN's fleet (150k), it's still large enough in size to move the needle. 648 nodes × 8 ≈ 5,184 GPUs (B200) 440 nodes × 8 ≈ 3,520 GPUs (B300) This confirms the rumor that $IREN may have been procuring GPUs from someone other than Dell. And depending on delivery dates, these GPUs may also explain why Q1 has seen a continued decline in estimated hashrate. I hope the delivery targets for these GPUs is ahead of the 50k recently ordered from Dell US/Canada as it would partially explain why they were still taking miners offline in Q1. (i'll make a separate post on this later).

$IREN One of my favorite parts of the @FransBakker9812 and @bitcoinbutcher1 spaces with @danroberts0101 was the discussion around customer prepayments and the comments from Dan that customer prepayments are in important part of their commercial negotiations. What they said: DAN: The Microsoft contracts are effectively fully funded today. The 50,000 GPUs we don't need to pay for until 30 days post shipping in the second half. We anticipate getting a healthy level of customer prepayments against that. And finally — we've raised $9.3 billion in the last eight months through prepayments, convertibles, GPU leasing, and GPU financing. This is about optionality and discipline, and should not be taken as an urgent need whatsoever to issue equity. And one final thought — this concept of issuing equity being dilutive: I think that's back to front. It's accretive. We issue a billion dollars of equity — we've got a billion dollars of cash. We're all on this call because we believe investing in the AI cycle, in a space where the demand-supply equation is so tilted, is likely to deliver outsize returns. But again, the benefit here is that it's an option, not an obligation — it's over time rather than a fixed point in time. FRANS: That's absolutely helpful context. I'd like to touch on what you said about customer prepayments expected against these new GPU purchases. With the scarcity of GPUs and longer delivery times, would you say that end users have more appetite to do these prepayments? And would you also say this is reflected in contract durations — that customers are generally willing to sign for longer in 2026 given these constraints? DAN: Yes, I think it is. Customer prepayments remain an important feature of our commercial negotiations across the market, whether it's hyperscalers, enterprises, or AI-native companies. In terms of contract durations — absolutely, they are trending toward longer tenors, particularly where customers have confidence in deployment timing and execution. I believe the data bares out the fact that $IREN is getting ~20% prepayments from all/most customers (not just MSFT). And I believe the data also bares out the fact that these prepayments are being credited on the back-end of the contract duration (beyond year 1). Using GAAP reported data from the 10Qs such as Deferred Revenue and RPOs (Remaining Performance Obligations), we can back into a proxy of prepayment %. First the definitions of the metrics: Deferred Revenue (aka Total Contract Liabilities) = cash IREN has already received from customers but hasn't yet recognized as revenue. This is money in hand, service still owed. In the case of a CSP, the very definition of prepayment. RPOs = total contracted amount IREN still needs to deliver from already commenced contracts. An amount doesn't reach RPO until the contract has commenced. The contract doesn't commence until the GPUs are delivered and billing (e.g., MSFT deal isn't in RPOs yet because the contract hasn't commenced). Think of deferred revenue as the part of RPOs in which the company has already received the cash. Using these two metrics, specifically the delta quarter over quarter allows us to answer this question: Of every dollar of newly commenced contracts revenue ,how much did the customer pay upfront as a prepayment? I won't bore you with the math, but the implied prepay % is net change in deferred revenue / (net change in RPOs+AI Revenue within the period). During Q4, the implied prepay % was 20.8%. Additionally, because Total Contract Liabilities (aka Deferred revenue, aka prepayments) are broken up into 2 buckets ("Current Portion" and "Non Current Portion") it gives us insight into when IREN is crediting these prepayments back to the customer. Current Portion ($6.8M) — amount expected to be credited back to the customer within 12 months Non-Current ($39.8M) — credited back beyond 12 months (longer-dated contracts) As you can see, the vast majority of deferred revenue is going into the "we'll credit it back to you, after year 1 at the earliest" bucket...telling us that prepayments are being credited back on the back-end of the contract (not the first year). (Tool below is something I use/built to track this very "prepayment proxy" - all the numbers come straight from 10Qs)