Iren's (IREN 0.88%) recent earnings report was a test of patience. The stock closed at just under $40 per share on earnings day and plunged below $30 per share in after-hours trading. The next morning, Iren made back all of those losses and ended up by 5% for the day.
The AI data center provider has been one of the most volatile stocks in the entire market, with a 4.28 beta. (Stocks with a beta higher than 1 tend to be more volatile than the market.) High-percentage gains and dips are normal on any given day, but the stock's long-term fundamentals suggest it's a long-term winner. Here's why Iren has the potential to turn people into millionaires.
Iren didn't announce a new customer quite yet
One of the major hopes among bullish investors was that Iren would announce it had signed another deal similar to its five-year, $9.7 billion agreement with Microsoft. That deal accounted for only 200 megawatts, and Iren wrapped up 2025 with roughly 3 gigawatts in its pipeline.
NASDAQ: IREN
Key Data Points
Investors were initially disappointed that Iren didn't announce a new deal, which prompted the stock to crater early in after-hours trading. While Bitcoin mining results also fell short of expectations, that's not a significant part of Iren's long-term investment thesis.
CEO Daniel Roberts told investors in the earnings call that the company is negotiating multiple contracts, including a multibillion-dollar deal. That put people at ease since the long-term AI thesis remains intact.
Energy is one of the major bottlenecks for tech giants, and Iren helps to solve it. The company has the capacity to support multiple big deals, especially with its 1.4 gigawatt Sweetwater 1 facility on track to be energized in April. While a few other AI data center providers also have multi-gigawatt pipelines, Iren is bringing them to the market faster than its competitors.
The new Oklahoma site strengthens the long-term thesis
Although investors were disappointed by the lack of a new deal with a tech company, many of the same people were happy about the new 1.6 gigawatt data center campus Iren secured in Oklahoma. Power scheduling for the data center is set to ramp up in 2028, bringing Iren's total secured, grid-connected power to 4.5 gigawatts.
As AI infrastructure continues to scale and tech companies need more energy, Iren can win more deals similar to its Microsoft arrangement. The company turned 200 megawatts into $1.94 billion in annual recurring revenue. If the company can achieve that same rate with its 4.5 gigawatts (4,500 megawatts), it can bring in more than $40 billion in annual recurring revenue.
That's part of the reason Roberts referred to Iren's projected $3.4 billion in annual recurring revenue by the end of 2026 as "an early stage of monetization relative to the size of our secured power portfolio."
Iren's market cap is below $15 billion after a sharp correction, but when it monetizes its 4.5 gigawatt pipeline and adds more to it, the stock's valuation should soar and help turn more investors into millionaires.
