SydneyIREN raised $3 billion to exit Bitcoin mining.
1% convertible notes fund a $3.4 billion Nvidia cloud agreement and $3.5 billion in graphics processing unit purchases from Dell.
IREN shares fell over 3% in pre-market on dilution risk from the 32.5% conversion premium.
Sources: CoinDesk
WHY MINERS PIVOT
Bitcoin miners and AI data centers want the same scarce resource: cheap, abundant electricity at sites with grid connections and cooling. A miner that already owns 500MW of energized capacity can rip out ASICs and rack GPUs faster than a hyperscaler can permit a greenfield campus.
THE HALVING SQUEEZE
Bitcoin's block reward halves every four years by protocol design. The April 2024 halving cut miner revenue per block from 6.25 BTC to 3.125 BTC overnight. Unless price doubles to compensate, marginal miners are forced to find another use for their power contracts — or shut down.
THE CONVERTIBLE NOTE TRICK
A 1% coupon is roughly a third of the Treasury yield — lenders accept it because the note converts to equity if the stock rises past a strike price (here, a 32.5% premium). The issuer gets near-free cash now; existing shareholders eat the dilution if the bet works.
THE GPU SCARCITY ECONOMY
Nvidia's H100 and successor Blackwell chips are allocated, not sold — the company decides who gets capacity. A multi-billion-dollar Dell purchase plus a direct Nvidia cloud agreement is less a transaction than a place in the queue.
THE PRECEDENT
Core Scientific, Hut 8, TeraWulf, and Applied Digital have all signed AI hosting deals since 2024. Core Scientific signed a $3.5B+ contract with CoreWeave. The pattern is consistent: the value of a miner is now its power contract, not its mining rig.