IREN Price Target Cut as Bernstein Sees Firm Dumping Bitcoin Mining for AI

In brief

• Bernstein cut IREN's price target from $125 to $100 amid Bitcoin mining scale-down and share dilution, while keeping an Outperform rating.
• IREN is transitioning from Bitcoin mining to AI cloud, anchored by a major Microsoft GPU contract worth $1.94 billion in annualized revenue.
• By 2030, Bernstein forecasts $6 billion in cloud revenue and ~82% EBITDA margins as IREN scales to 275,000 GPUs.

Bernstein analysts trimmed their price target on IREN from $125 to $100 per share Monday while reaffirming the stock as their top pick among AI-focused Bitcoin miners, citing the company's rapid transformation into a superscale AI cloud provider—and an expectation that it will fully wind down crypto mining operations in the coming years.

The investment firm said the target reduction reflects two factors unrelated to IREN's business prospects: a scaling back of Bitcoin mining and an increase in shares outstanding from recent equity issuances—not any deterioration in the company's AI ambitions.

At the heart of the bull case is a major deal with Microsoft. IREN has contracted 77,000 of its 150,000 GPUs to the software giant under a five-year deal anchored by roughly $1.94 billion in annualized revenue. The remaining GPU capacity is being marketed to on-demand cloud customers, with $400 million in contracts already signed as of February.

To finance the buildout, IREN struck a $5.8 billion purchase agreement with Dell for Nvidia GB300 processors and secured $3.6 billion in GPU-backed financing at an interest rate below 6%. Combined with Microsoft prepayments, the arrangement covers roughly 95 percent of the capital needed for the Microsoft contract, analysts said.

Bernstein projects that IREN's AI cloud revenues will reach $2.6 billion in 2027 and climb to $6 billion by 2030, when the company expects to operate a fleet of 275,000 GPUs—up from 150,000 today. Adjusted EBITDA margins are forecast to stabilize near 82 percent at scale, implying nearly $5 billion in earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization by the end of the decade.

The company's 4.5 gigawatts of power holdings—spanning sites in Texas, British Columbia and Oklahoma—underpin the longer-term growth story. Bernstein valued IREN's 3.6 gigawatts of undeveloped capacity in Sweetwater and Oklahoma at $3 million per megawatt, contributing roughly $10.8 billion to the firm's sum-of-the-parts valuation.

Bitcoin mining, once the core of IREN's business, is assigned zero value in the updated model. Analysts expect the company to continue replacing mining hardware with GPU racks as it repurposes existing infrastructure for cloud workloads. Bernstein projects that the firm’s mining revenue will plunge in the coming years before reaching zero in fiscal year 2030.

Many other prominent Bitcoin mining firms have strongly embraced the AI opportunity in recent months, with some even abandoning crypto mining altogether amid the AI boom.

IREN shares recently traded at $43.78, down more than 9% on the day amid a broader AI-related stock rout tied to a report of OpenAI underperformance. Over the last month, IREN shares have jumped by nearly 25%. At the current price, Bernstein’s price target represents approximately 128% upside for investors.

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