Hello, I'm John Furrier with the Cube. We are here at our NYSE Cube studios overlooking the stock exchange here in New York. And of course, we got our Palo Alto studios connecting Silicon Valley and Wall Street, tech and money together. Again, we are here as part of the AI factory inaugural kickoff series of our media week ongoing series. We feature the leaders in AI factories. The future of the data center as distributed computing continues to go, you know, continues to expand. Large scale systems are powering it. Daniel Roberts here, co-founder and co-CEO of IREN, doing extremely well on the public markets right now. Stocks at a 52-week high this week. Congratulations, Daniel. Thanks for coming on the Cube.
Thanks for having us, John.
So, you guys are really a great illustration of an AI factory business. You're also a great illustration of a data center business because you have a lot of data centers, a lot of power. You've done some Bitcoin applications, but now AI factory and the energy story is obviously now understood. Stock prices like almost like literally straight up in the past eight months. Business is good. Everyone's talking about more power, data center stories, front page of all the top news outlets. This billion going to this state, another billion going over there, hundred billion going to OpenAI from Nvidia. I mean, it really showcases the fact that data center demand is at an all-time high. I mean, you got to love that.
Oh, look, it's a good time to be in the sector. Absolutely. And it's, I think, it's both sides of the coin. It's the demand side. We're seeing that continue to escalate, but also on the supply side because what we're dealing with AI factories is fundamentally a new asset class. So legacy data centers based in metropolitan areas just aren't geared up for the level of power required, the rack density and the architecture.
Yeah. And we're seeing the enterprise market like getting ready and it's not fully as opened up as we thought it would be this year. We think maybe next year, but we see massive growth on the hyperscalers and then the rise of the neo clouds or AI as a service, GPU as a service, anywhere anyone can get horsepower or, you know, any kind of like compute for these applications for training and inference, those are the top applications. How has your AI factory changed? What was the moment you knew, okay, Bitcoin's great. Bitcoin miners, they're bounded by power. AI is bounded by power. What was the moment was like, 'Okay, AI's here.' And then when did it click in on the AI factory piece? Take me through that mindset, because that's a huge business decision.
Yeah, look, it is. But 7 years ago when my brother and I founded this business, it was on the premise that the digitization of society was coming. We were moving into the cloud as humans and we're seeing all these exponential digital adoption curves where things are going 0 to 1 overnight. So Bitcoin was worth nothing years ago. Today it's a $2 trillion asset class. Two years ago AI was confined to the hallways of PhD researchers. Today it's the next humanity-defining step change. And I think at its fundamental core, it's really hard to build out data centers at scale. Yet these end-addressable markets are going vertical in terms of their appetite for compute and that's where we come in. We've got an enormous amount of data center capacity.
Dan, you know, it's funny. We just moved a new studio here, opening up a new hub in New York, obviously having the access point in New York. We hear things in the hallway here at the NYSE. Things like maybe we should turn the data center into a commodities trade. Energy's there too. So kind of like this is an asset class. I mean, there's already discussions of maybe if I pre-buy the energy now from the data center or buy GPU cycles now, I can resell them. That doesn't really... I mean, that's New York thinking. You guys are there with it. It's almost options. It's option pricing.
Yeah, it is because we're seeing that option be cashed in now. We're seeing an insatiable appetite for GPU cloud capacity. We've expanded from 1,900 servers at the end of June and we've now got 23,000 either operating or being installed in the coming months and we've got capacity to 3x that in short order as well.
Talk about the data center topology. How many data centers? Can you share a number? And what are you guys doing that others aren't? Because the old data center model was a bunch of REITs, real estate play, hosting providers, and then cloud comes in, then they need capacity, and then you start to see the real systems design of a data center as not just a building with power and putting racks of servers on it. It was like, whoa, let's design this as a supercomputer. That is now obvious, but it wasn't seven years ago. You guys saw that. What do you guys do? Take us through the mechanics of your business.
Yeah, so I think the first thing we did was lock up a lot of power. So we've got almost three gigawatts of secured land and power and we've got about 800 megawatts of operating data centers today where because we've got those data centers operating, we're actively swapping out Bitcoin mining ASICs and installing NVIDIA GPUs every day at the moment to service AI training, AI inference. And even to your earlier point, we're starting to see the emergence of some enterprise demand via our U partners.
It's interesting. You did all the hard work up front. Now everyone's spending a lot of dough to do that. You guys have it.
It was a tough few years, but yeah, right now we're in a really good spot.
Tailwind's an understatement. What's the role of the Dell AI factory? Because one of the things we are seeing, first of all, Jensen Huang coined the term AI factory two years, I think two years ago at GTC. And then this year you said KV cache is the operating system, which was a really telling sign that networking is a part of it. So it's really in the weeds there and then Dell adopted that. So Dell used to sell servers. They still do, but now an AI factory is just a lot of servers and there's packaging. There's all kinds of things that they've done. What was the role of Nvidia and Dell technologies in your deployments and your success?
Yeah, look, Dell's role is far more broad than just the servers these days. Yes, they've been a really valuable partner on the AI factory side. So, their air-cooled variant, the XC 9680, has a lot of practical benefits over other OEMs. So, we've had really good success with that. But as we move into liquid-cooled systems, the way they view the data center is similar to us. The data center is the unit of compute and it's about how the whole data center interfaces together. So it's the servers, it's the network, it's the cooling, it's the GPU, and how all that comes together in terms of reliability, resiliency. So we're in the process of rolling out an NVL 72. So these are the Grace Blackwell 300s from Nvidia in partnership with Dell at the moment.
Yeah. Well, we interviewed Michael Dell. We've been covering Dell for a long time, but a couple folks years ago, EAB and John Rose saw this well and they talk about it the same way you do. It's like a factory is a system and then there's a collection of kinds of software on their scale-up and scale-out servers and systems and fabrics and storage fabrics and network fabrics. But what was interesting was that they go by OCP standards and what I noticed with your business, I saw the video of the time progression when you do the swap-outs. It's just like it looks easy. I mean, I know it's not easy but it's not hard. I mean, it's not like you're tearing the building down to the studs or in this case completely ripping out. So talk about that switching cost because this is where I think the AI factories plays well because you can just drop it in. I know you guys do that. Take us through what that was like, scope that plan, that transition to AI factories.
So we built multi-purpose data centers spec for AI factories from day one in terms of the end rack density level. So for us today we've got 160 megawatts of data centers ready to go for these AI factories. So, we're actively swapping out those mining racks, installing Blackwells and a few AMD chips as well.
And then the customer side. Okay. So, you got the factories up and running. I mean, it abstracts out the complexities. When you see factory, you think output value. What are the customer value points on the AI cloud service? What are some of the things? I mean, obviously you've got your door being knocked down. What are some of the examples?
Yeah. And the thing I love about the term factories is every other prior industrial revolution has been defined by factories and the workers in it, right? And you come to the fourth industrial revolution which is all about leveraging human intelligence. And within these AI factories, the workers are the GPUs. They're the clusters, right? And they don't clock off. They don't tire. They work. They can scale up to millions. And that's how we're scaling human intelligence. And the ability for us to do that is super exciting.
And the performance side, you have to hit that SLA. You got to make sure you got good performance. How are those factories working? What's some of the results? Can you share some anecdotes or stories?
Yeah, so this is where we're relatively unique. We're fully vertically integrated. So we own the land. We own the substations for the power connect. We own the grid connection. We own the buildings all the way down to the server level. And what that allows us to do is to provide a very resilient, low-cost service to customers because we don't have intermediaries. We don't have third-party colocation fees that we need to pay. We don't have to get on a call to a colocation partner under their SLA. We have boots on the ground, people in the data centers. Our customers have direct access to those people and it creates a really seamless, reliable service.
And they get what they want. They get everything they need.
At the end of the day, that's the most important thing.
On the business model, one of the things that I love about your logo, it's green. Green is money. Stock prices are doing good. You guys are healthy on the business side. Great momentum. So, congratulations. But the sustainability piece is huge. Could you explain that portion of your business model?
Look, 100% of all power we've consumed in the last 7 years has been from renewable energy sources. So, it's been an absolute defining part of our business. And when you look at the projections for this data center industry, McKinsey forecasting another 100 gigawatts of data center demand over the next 5 years, you need to do that sustainably. And our view is go to the source of low-cost renewables and monetize that into GPU cloud.
