In a market where nearly every discussion about artificial intelligence (AI) circles back to the "Magnificent Seven" tech giants, a quieter contender is slowly beginning to steal the spotlight: Iren (IREN 4.91%), an Australian company once known primarily for Bitcoin mining.
Throughout 2025, Iren has undergone a remarkable transformation by reinventing itself as a pure play on AI infrastructure, the invisible backbone of the digital revolution. While Wall Street continues to fixate on chipmakers and megacap partnerships, Iren is focused on building the physical layers that make the AI era possible.
From Bitcoin miner to AI powerhouse
Iren's story begins in an unexpected place: renewable-powered Bitcoin mining. Once dismissed as a wasteful pursuit, the crypto industry forced Iren to master the intricacies of power efficiency, high-density cooling, and large-scale computing. These same competencies have now become the company's greatest competitive advantage.
Iren identified a natural overlap between Bitcoin mining and the evolution of AI: The same infrastructure that verifies digital transactions for Bitcoin mining can be parlayed to support the computational needs of AI. Leaning into this discovery, Iren began channeling capital into high-performance data centers -- securing reliable power sources while deploying next-generation GPUs to meet surging demand for AI computing.
By reengineering its facilities for AI workloads, Iren turned a cyclical, commodity-tied crypto business into an operation that's positioned to ride durable, secular AI tailwinds. The company's strategic pivot captures a profound truth: Energy and computing have become the chief currencies of growth in the digital economy.
Image source: Getty Images.
The rise of the neocloud and why it matters
To understand Iren's opportunity, it helps to first grasp the rise of a new phenomenon in computing: the neocloud.
Traditional cloud providers like Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Google Cloud were built to handle flexible workloads such as website hosting, data storage, and enterprise software. The new generation of neoclouds, by contrast, is built specifically for the AI era.
Companies like CoreWeave, Nebius Group, and Oracle are deploying dense clusters of Nvidia's GPUs connected by high-speed networks optimized for training and inferencing large language models (LLMs).
Demand for this infrastructure is surging. Microsoft recently committed $17.4 billion to Nebius, while Meta Platforms inked a $14 billion deal with CoreWeave. Oracle, meanwhile, may be the biggest early winner of infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) adoption thanks to its $300 billion partnership with OpenAI, positioning the company at the center of the next cloud supercycle.
This shift underscores a new reality: The AI economy requires purpose-built infrastructure, and the companies laying this foundation will shape the next decade of digital transformation. Iren fits neatly into this narrative. By combining sustainable power with scalable GPU clusters, the company is positioning itself to capture a share of this high-growth, capacity-constrained pocket of the AI realm.
Is Iren stock still a buy after its 2025 rally?
Iren's transformation hasn't gone completely unnoticed. Its shares surged 512% during 2025 as retail investors begin to embrace the company's value proposition -- and, perhaps more importantly, wager that it could become the next player to sign a megadeal with a hyperscaler.
Yet such a meteoric rise invites an important question: Is Iren stock now overbought?
The answer depends on perspective. From a long-term view, Iren sits at the confluence of two unstoppable forces: AI computing demand and renewable energy infrastructure. Its vertically integrated model could, in time, generate steady, recurring revenue as AI clients lock into long-term contracts.
In the near term, however, valuation risk looms. The company still needs to prove that it can translate its ambitious hardware build-out into consistent, paying customers -- and that sustained profitability can outlast speculative enthusiasm.
Even so, Iren's quiet reinvention captures the spirit of technological disruption. It is neither a crypto miner nor a traditional cloud provider, but something entirely new: a bridge between renewable power and AI development. If management executes on this business model, Iren could become a central character within the broader AI infrastructure story.
For now, Wall Street remains largely silent -- but this silence might not last for much longer. I see Iren as one of today's overlooked stocks that have the potential to become one of tomorrow's household names.
