IREN’s 5-Gigawatt Power Pipeline Draws Bernstein’s $100 Bet as AI Cloud Pivot Gains Traction

Bernstein rates IREN Outperform with $100 target, citing 5 GW power capacity as key to AI cloud pivot despite $3B debt raise and earnings miss.

The gold in the AI gold rush isn’t just chips and algorithms — it’s grid capacity. And IREN, the Bitcoin miner reinventing itself as a cloud-computing provider, has locked up exactly the kind of power access that Big Tech is scrambling for. That thesis drove Bernstein to slap an “Outperform” rating on the stock with a $100 price target, even as the company juggles a massive debt raise and a shaky quarterly earnings miss.

Bitcoin miners now control roughly 27 gigawatts of planned electricity capacity in the United States, and industry-wide deals with AI-heavyweight tenants already exceed $90 billion in aggregate contract value, according to Bernstein. IREN sits on 5 GW of secured power capacity — a figure the bank says gives it a crucial edge in a market where hooking up a single new gigawatt now takes a median 50 months. That timeline compression makes pre-wired infrastructure more valuable than raw mining hash rate.

The stock has been riding that story, but not without turbulence. Shares surged more than 8% on Wednesday in Frankfurt to €44.39, recovering some of the losses that followed IREN’s announcement of a $3 billion convertible bond offering. The bond, priced with a conversion premium near $73 and capped at roughly $110 via so-called capped calls, spooked investors initially on dilution concerns. Since then, the shares have eased back to around €42.60, though they remain up roughly 480% on a 12-month basis.

That kind of volatility is baked into the IREN narrative. The annualized swing over the past month hit 121.75%, and options markets are pricing in continued whiplash: implied volatility sits at 118%, with notable put activity at the $42-to-$43 strike range. The technical picture offers little clarity — the relative strength index at 57.7 sits in neutral territory.

But the long-term arithmetic hinges on converting those gigawatts into recurring cloud revenue. Bernstein values IREN at roughly 5.2 times the $3.7 billion in annualized recurring revenue the company targets by the end of 2026. That compares with about 7 times for rival Nebius, leaving what the bank calls “more room” if IREN executes on its pipeline. To get there, the company plans to bring 480 megawatts of AI cloud capacity online by year-end.

The push beyond Bitcoin is also a branding exercise. Mid-May, IREN acquired the creative agency Awaken, whose founder Chris Parker will lead global marketing. The move is designed to raise visibility in the competitive AI cloud market, where the company’s pitch is less about crypto and more about high-performance computing on stranded power.

The operational road is steep. Last quarter, IREN reported $144.8 million in revenue, well below the $219 million analysts had penciled in. That gap tempers some of the infrastructure enthusiasm. Meanwhile, the broader crypto market threw in its own headwind: on May 18, $732 million flowed out of Bitcoin and Ethereum ETFs, a move that tends to spill into mining-equity sentiment.

Looking further out, IREN has set a $11 billion-plus annual revenue target from AI cloud and mining by 2030. That ambition requires turning reserved power into signed contracts and recurring income streams — a conversion that Bernstein believes is viable but that the market is still pricing with a heavy discount for execution risk. For now, the stock trades as a bet on grid access, not on Bitcoin’s next move.