Should Investors Buy IREN as AI Growth Meets a Premium Valuation?

IREN's AI Revenue Base Is Scaling Quickly

AI Cloud Services revenues increased to $33.6 million in third-quarter fiscal 2026 from $17.3 million in the prior quarter. Management expects the larger revenue ramp from Microsoft and roughly 50,000 additional GPUs to begin in the third quarter of calendar 2026 and remain back-end weighted.

IREN is targeting 480 MW of AI Cloud capacity and 150,000 GPUs by the end of calendar 2026. After July contract wins, the company lifted its year-end annualized run-rate revenue target to more than $4 billion from $3.7 billion.

IREN's Contract Backlog Improves Visibility

The five-year Microsoft agreement is valued at $9.7 billion. Microsoft accepted Horizon 1 at Childress in August, the first of four 50 MW deployments tied to that contract. The five-year NVIDIA agreement is valued at $3.4 billion and represents about $700 million of expected annualized recurring revenue.

IREN also announced $2.8 billion of new multi-year cloud services contracts in July. Those agreements lifted the contracted portion of its year-end AI Cloud revenue target to about 85%, while customer prepayments on agreements signed since June 1 covered roughly 45% of related GPU capital expenditures.

IREN Trades Above Its Subindustry on Sales

IREN trades at 4.59X forward 12-month sales, above the Zacks subindustry's 2.58X and its own five-year median of 2.33X. That premium raises the importance of converting contracted demand into operating capacity and revenues on schedule.

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CoreWeave, Inc. CRWV offers relevant industry context. The AI cloud operator reported a $99.4 billion revenue backlog as of March 31, 2026, illustrating the scale of contracted demand across providers racing to add compute capacity.

IREN's Capital and Execution Risks Stay High

IREN expects its AI cloud platform to reach roughly 1,210 MW in 2027, with 730 MW under construction across British Columbia and Texas. It had $2.6 billion of cash at April 30 and expects cash, operating cash flow, GPU financing and other financing initiatives to support near-term spending.

Additional transition-related impairment charges could total approximately $520 million. Construction, GPU delivery, commissioning or customer acceptance delays could also defer revenue conversion. Applied Digital Corporation APLD, another AI data center developer, surpassed 1 GW of contracted capacity in May and later secured a revolving credit facility of up to $550 million, underscoring the funding demands of large AI infrastructure builds.

IREN's Growth Score Outshines Its Value Signals

The bottom line is that IREN's contracted demand and AI Cloud expansion support a credible growth case, but the premium sales multiple and capital-heavy buildout leave less room for execution slippage. The stock currently carries a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold), supporting patience rather than an aggressive directional call. You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.

IREN has a Growth Score of B, while its Value Score of D, Momentum Score of F and VGM Score of D are less supportive. Because the Zacks Style Scores complement the Zacks Rank, this mix favors a wait-and-see stance while IREN converts contracted demand into operating capacity and recurring revenue.

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This article originally published on Zacks Investment Research (zacks.com).

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