#iren

#iren

A lot of the hoopla started when investors questioned Oracle's ( NASDAQ:ORCL) heavy debt load for the OpenAI deal. Capital expenditures came under pressure, and people wondered how OpenAI would be able to pay $300 billion over five years. That contract starts in 2027, and rumors circulated that OpenAI pushed back its data center completion to 2028, a year later than initially planned. It put more pressure on AI data center providers like IREN, even though Oracle refuted the rumor on the same day.

Shares of IREN ( NASDAQ:IREN) are trading at $47.9, extending an impressive 17% gain over the past week. The stock now commands the highest social sentiment score across all tracked equities, registering 85 out of 100 on Reddit as of December 7. That puts IREN 18.6 points ahead of the second-place stock, Alphabet ( NASDAQ:GOOGL), which scored 66.4. Reddit Activity Surges on r/stocks IREN discussion on Reddit reached elevated levels over the December 6-7 weekend, with activity scores peaking at 44 and remaining above 30 across eight consecutive periods. The sentiment data shows concentrated discussion around the Microsoft AI Cloud contract, the company's profitability transformation, and its GPU deployment plans. The concentration of discussion within r/stocks, rather than dispersed across promotional subreddits, signals genuine community interest in the stock's fundamentals.

But the sharp selloff appears to have largely run its course. More importantly, the fundamental catalyst that can propel IREN's stock significantly higher remains firmly intact: the transformative $9.7 billion, five-year AI cloud contract with Microsoft ( NASDAQ:MSFT ) announced earlier this month. It validates IREN's strategy, secures massive upfront cash, and positions the company as a go-to provider in a market starving for immediately available, renewable energy-powered compute.

Microsoft has entered into a $9.7 billion cloud services contract with artificial intelligence cloud service provider IREN that will give it access to some of Nvidia's chips. Microsoft spent nearly $35 billion in the July-September quarter on capital expenditures to support AI and cloud demand, nearly half of that on computer chips and much of the rest related to data center real estate.

IREN (NASDAQ: IREN) reported a record Q3 revenue of $148.1 million, a 172% increase year-over-year, driven by efficient Bitcoin mining and a 98% margin AI cloud segment.