IREN Stock Tumbles 35% Despite $3.4 Billion Nvidia Deal: The Cost of a High-Speed Pivot

Bitcoin miner turned AI cloud builder IREN loses a third of its value in a month, burdened by high costs and shareholder dilution from aggressive expansion.

IREN Limited, the bitcoin miner turned AI infrastructure builder, embodies a market contradiction: a $3.4 billion partnership with Nvidia and a stock that has cratered more than a third in a single month. The company’s aggressive pivot from cryptocurrency mining to cloud computing for artificial intelligence has won it marquee contracts, but the financial toll of that transformation is now laid bare in its share price.

On Friday, the stock clawed back 7.82% to close at €36.60 in European trading, offering a brief respite from a brutal stretch. Over the past 30 days, however, IREN has lost 35.19% of its value — a figure that closely matches the 35.62% decline reported in parallel market data. The weekly drop stands at 12.27%. Zooming out to a 12-month view still shows a hefty gain of 152.75% to 154.45%, but the stock now trades 46.66% below its November 2025 record of €68.61.

The root of the sell-off lies in the legacy business that made IREN a Wall Street darling. Publicly listed bitcoin miners sold more than 32,000 BTC in the first quarter of 2026 — more than the entire industry sold in all of 2025. The math is brutal: industry estimates peg the production cost of a single bitcoin at roughly $78,000, while the cryptocurrency changes hands at around $62,500. That gap, compounded by low hash prices after the latest halving, is systematically destroying margins in IREN’s original core.

Management saw the writing on the wall early. IREN pivoted toward AI cloud services, leveraging its own land, renewable energy sources and existing data center infrastructure. The crown jewel of that strategy is a five-year, $3.4 billion contract with Nvidia for 60 megawatts of cloud capacity at the Childress, Texas facility. Nvidia also structured a $2.1 billion investment vehicle tied to the deployment of graphics processors in IREN’s plants. A separate major order from Microsoft sits on the books, and the Nvidia partnership has deepened.

The expansion is accelerating. A 1.4-gigawatt substation at the West Texas site has been pulled forward to begin operations in April 2026. IREN targets 480 megawatts of AI cloud capacity this year and 1,210 megawatts in 2027, backed by a total energy pipeline of 5.8 gigawatts. Revenue ambitions are equally aggressive: the company expects its annualized AI cloud run rate to surpass $500 million by the first quarter of 2026 and hit $3.4 billion by the end of the year.

But building out massive data centers costs money — lots of it. IREN recently placed convertible bonds worth $3 billion and expanded its ongoing at-the-market equity sales program. The proceeds fund rapid expansion but severely dilute existing shareholders. Investors are effectively paying a steep price for growth, and the market’s patience is wearing thin.

Chart watchers see little comfort. The stock trades 21.71% to 22.22% below its 50-day moving average of €46.75, a clear confirmation of a short-term downtrend. The relative strength index sits at 35.8, suggesting selling is somewhat overdone, but the annualized 30-day volatility of 94.14% underscores how violently the market swings between IREN’s two narratives — a shrinking bitcoin mining business and a high-growth AI cloud operation that has yet to prove it can deliver profitably at scale.

The next quarterly earnings will be the true test. Only then will investors see whether AI cloud revenue is actually ramping at the pace the Nvidia deal and capacity plans promise. Until those numbers land, IREN remains a high-risk stock straddling a fading past and a future that still carries a hefty price tag.