• H.C. Wainwright said that the stage is set for a transformative year for Iren. 
• The firm said Iren provides the most levered exposure across its coverage universe to the AI infrastructure trade theme. 
• IREN last year announced a multi-year agreement with Microsoft valued at approximately $9.7 billion to deliver GPU cloud infrastructure powered by NVIDIA GB300 GPUs.

Shares of IREN Limited rallied on Friday as a recent analyst upgrade and Microsoft contract kept retail investors bullish on the stock.

H.C. Wainwright double upgraded Iren (IREN) to ‘Buy’ from ‘Sell’ with a price target of $80, up from $56. 

The firm said that "the stage is set for a transformative year." The firm expects the AI infrastructure trade will continue to be a major investment theme in 2026 and believes that IREN provides "the most levered exposure across our coverage universe to this theme," the analyst told investors. 

The company has already secured one of the largest AI contracts to date among the BTC miners with "a blue-chip counterparty" in Microsoft (MSFT) and IREN has the largest near-term development pipeline across the analyst's coverage with over 2 GW of incremental capacity expected to fully energize by 2027, the firm added.

Microsoft Contract

IREN last year announced a multi-year agreement with Microsoft valued at approximately $9.7 billion to deliver GPU cloud infrastructure powered by NVIDIA GB300 GPUs.

Under the agreement, IREN will deliver large scale GPU clusters accommodated within IREN’s liquid cooled data centers under construction at its 750 MW campus located in Childress, Texas. The GPUs will be deployed in four phases through 2026 and will collectively provide 200MW of critical IT load. 

The five-year contract includes a 20 percent prepayment and is expected to contribute roughly $1.94 billion in annualized run rate revenue once fully commissioned.

In conjunction with the announcement of the Microsoft partnership, IREN also entered into an agreement with Dell Technologies to purchase the GPUs and ancillary equipment for approximately $5.8 billion. 

How Did Stocktwits Users React?

Retail sentiment around IREN trended in ‘extremely bullish’ territory amid.

One user expects a new announcement from IREN.

Another user predicted the stock price to go past $100 soon.

Shares of Iren Limited have rallied more than 400% over the past year.