$IREN - Complete A-Z investment case In this post I’ll cover why I expect this hyper-growth stock to crack $150 over the next 18 months—representing a gain of 1150% from its current price of $12 📈 I went ‘All-In’ this stock, and for good reason…. 🧵

$IREN: SemiAnalysis crossed a line… If you recall my post from yesterday, I wasn’t going to keep dragging this topic out. $IREN clearly intends to handle the situation pragmatically and collaboratively instead of turning it into a public fight with @SemiAnalysis_, and I didn’t want to stand in the way of that by pouring gasoline on the fire. However, after hearing what none other than Kent Draper, $IREN's Chief Commercial Officer, had to say yesterday, I don’t think I can stay quiet on it anymore... There are several parts of Semi’s portrayal of $IREN that deserve additional context, because once you hear IREN's side of the story, some of the claims in Semi’s ClusterMAX report start to look very different. Kent went on @McnallieM yesterday for a 1 hour interview and, toward the very end, directly addressed the new ClusterMAX ranking and the accusations surrounding $IREN's Prince George site. I’ve attached his full response below because I think everyone should hear it for themselves. But read this post first, then watch the clip... It hits much harder with the full context and my added commentary. The first issue starts with the ranking methodology itself. ClusterMAX explicitly says it is ranking managed Slurm and Kubernetes clusters. Yet as Kent confirmed, $IREN does not even have a live managed-services environment today. Investors following the company already knew this. Managed services are a capability IREN is only now building out following the @MirantisIT acquisition, which brought in the orchestration layer and enterprise cloud expertise needed to move beyond predominantly bare-metal compute. That immediately raises a pretty obvious question: If ClusterMAX is specifically a ranking of managed clusters, and $IREN does not currently have a managed cluster product available for Semi to test, why is IREN being ranked as "Underperforming" in the first place? The fair classification was always "Unavailable". That may technically sit below Underperforming on the ranking, but the implication is completely different. Unavailable simply tells the reader that there was no qualifying product available to test. Underperforming tells the reader that Semi tested $IREN's managed offering and found it poor. According to Kent, they couldn’t have done that because the product isn’t live yet. This becomes even stranger when Semi goes as far as recommending that $IREN “stop pretending to offer managed clusters and inference endpoints” because of the supposed shortcomings of those services. How exactly do you reach a conclusion on the quality of a managed service that has not launched? If anything, the limited evidence we currently have around $IREN's forthcoming managed-services capabilities points in the opposite direction. Kent specifically said IREN has already signed managed-services clusters with NVIDIA for its own internal R&D workloads. That sits alongside NVIDIA’s broader five-year, $3.4B cloud agreement with $IREN across 60MW of capacity. NVIDIA obviously understands GPU infrastructure better than virtually anyone on the planet, and as Kent pointed out, they conducted extensive diligence around $IREN's ability to deliver before signing a contract of that size for their own workloads. So before $IREN's managed-services platform has even properly launched, one of the first companies willing to underwrite it is NVIDIA itself. Semi somehow found room to tell IREN to stop marketing a service that isn’t live yet, but apparently didn’t find that worth discussing... Then we get to Prince George, which is where most of the really aggressive language in Semi’s write-up comes from. Kent did not deny that Prince George has experienced issues, nor did he try to pretend the site was built from day one like IREN's newer AI infrastructure. He explained that Prince George was originally a Bitcoin mining facility that $IREN has been retrofitting for AI compute, and the company was installing additional power redundancy as part of that process. The important part is WHY the GPUs came online before all of that redundancy was finished. According to Kent, customers wanted access to the compute as quickly as possible. $IREN therefore brought the GPUs online while the redundancy buildout was still progressing, and those customers were fully aware of the setup from the beginning. That is a very different picture from IREN secretly cutting corners, handing customers an inferior product and then getting caught after the fact. It was a known tradeoff... Customers wanted the GPUs immediately, $IREN had the capacity available, and they were willing to accept reduced redundancy during the retrofit in exchange for getting access to scarce compute sooner. And today, the very power redundancy Semi criticized as “missing” is already being commissioned. There is also a pretty funny detail here that I think deserves more attention. The only customer relationship Semi actually names in connection with the Prince George problems is TogetherAI (@togethercompute). Semi tested Together capacity running out of Prince George and says it knows of multiple unhappy Together customers using that infrastructure. Semi also claims to have heard complaints from customers renting directly from $IREN, but none of those customers are identified. Meanwhile, Kent confirmed in the exact same interview that Together recently renewed or expanded its relationship with IREN. In other words, the one company sitting between Semi and the Prince George cluster they use as their clearest example of $IREN's supposed unreliability decided to do more business with IREN. That doesn’t mean an outage never happened or that every downstream Together customer had a flawless experience. It does, however, make the broader portrayal of Prince George as some completely dysfunctional operation rather difficult to square with the commercial behavior of the customer Semi itself links most directly to the site. If the experience was truly as irredeemable as the language in ClusterMAX suggests, why is Together signing up for more? The fiber accusation gets even more interesting... Semi specifically mocked Prince George for supposedly having a single Internet Service Provider (ISP) with no redundancy. Yet, Kent directly contradicted that. $IREN does have redundant fiber at Prince George. What happened over the summer was that wildfires in British Columbia damaged parts of the surrounding fiber network, temporarily reducing the level of redundancy available to the site. Those are two very different things... A site being architected without redundant fiber is an infrastructure decision, while a site having redundant fiber and then temporarily losing portions of that redundancy because wildfires physically damaged external lines is an operational event. Yet if you only read Semi’s version, you would walk away believing $IREN simply built the site with one ISP and called it a day. Prince George also tells you very little about how IREN’s next generation of infrastructure is being built. Kent confirmed that Horizon, the future Childress deployments and Sweetwater will incorporate full power, mechanical and cooling redundancy from day one, including full concurrent maintainability. Semi itself even acknowledges that Childress and Sweetwater look considerably better than Prince George. Which makes the attempt to use a retrofitted Bitcoin mining facility in Northern Canada as some sweeping indictment of where $IREN's cloud platform is heading even more questionable. Reporting genuine outages, reliability problems or customer complaints is completely fair game. I want publications like Semi digging into that stuff. But there is a difference between reporting those problems and taking issues at one transitional retrofit site, assigning an Underperforming rating to a managed service the company doesn’t even offer yet, telling $IREN to stop pretending it offers that service, calling Prince George the “#1 worst site in the industry according to some anonymous users”, and then suggesting NVIDIA’s involvement might help IREN “cut less corners this time around.” That is where, in my opinion, the report crossed from analysis into grandstanding... Especially when a considerable amount of the missing context could have been cleared up with a direct conversation with $IREN. And that brings me back to how IREN itself handled this. I have never shied away from criticizing $IREN's investor relations and communication when I thought they deserved it. I dedicated an entire section of our latest earnings report to the issue and have raised it publicly numerous times over the past year. But I’ve also been equally vocal in recent weeks about the improvement I’ve seen. There has been a meaningful uptick in investor communication, more context coming directly from management, and a much greater effort to shape the company’s own narrative before somebody else shapes it for them. This situation is another example where I genuinely could not have asked for a better response. $IREN didn’t put out some dramatic press release attacking Semi. They also didn’t start throwing accusations around on social media, and they didn’t turn a research report into a corporate feud that would only give the entire story more oxygen. Instead, their Chief Commercial Officer went onto an investor podcast, answered the question directly, explained the facts behind the situation and left it there. No grandstanding, no personal attacks, just context. At the same time, as I mentioned yesterday, IREN appears intent on working more closely with publications like Semi as its managed-services platform actually rolls out, which is exactly the right approach from a corporate perspective. There is zero reason to burn bridges with an influential industry publication when you can instead give them access to the real product once it exists and let the results speak for themselves. As a shareholder, I couldn’t be happier with how $IREN handled this. And massive credit to @McnallieM for hosting another excellent interview and asking Kent the question directly. This entire discussion would have remained one-sided without it. Now everyone has both sides of the story. Watch Kent’s full response below. Cheers! ✌️

A quick follow-up on the @SemiAnalysis_ / $IREN situation. I said earlier today that I would put out a longer post addressing the report and some of the claims made in it. That post would have been fairly combative. I’ve since gotten a better understanding of how $IREN itself intends to approach the situation. Rather than turning this into a prolonged public back-and-forth, the company appears focused on keeping the relationship constructive and building a more collaborative dialogue with SemiAnalysis as it continues scaling out its cloud offering. Given that, I’m not going to publish the extensive response I had planned. I completely understand why many $IREN investors are frustrated and why the reaction has been as strong as it has been. I disagree with several aspects of the report myself. But if the objective from here is to improve the relationship and create a more productive dialogue over time, continuing to escalate the hostility toward SemiAnalysis probably does more harm than good. So I’m going to bury the hatchet here. Cheers! ✌️

Goddamn... my brother Jim just annihilated @SemiAnalysis_'s new ClusterMax ranking. If anybody has a good pulse on this stuff, it’s Jim. He has multiple close friends and family members working at the likes of $ORCL and @FireworksAI_HQ, which gives him a pretty unique window into what’s actually happening on the ground. I’d put his take over anybody at Semi here... They’ve proven time and time again to completely miss the mark on major forecasts and industry calls. Later today, I’ll share my full take on Semi’s accusations against $IREN and its ClusterMax ranking.

$IREN: Abbott’s New Data Center Halt Texas Governor @GregAbbott_TX escalated his crackdown on data centers again yesterday, directing TCEQ to pause new air and water permits tied to data center development until ERCOT completes its ongoing audit of large loads. At first glance, this obviously reads bearish for Texas data center developers. After digging into $IREN's position specifically, though, I think the actual impact on the company is close to a nothing burger. Starting with Childress, TCEQ records show active construction stormwater coverage, no pending preconstruction air permits, and one open Title V operating permit that was filed in August. That last filing sounds more concerning than it really is. Title V is an operating permit that consolidates the site’s existing air obligations, and once a complete application has been filed, the application shield allows the facility to continue operating while TCEQ works through the process. So even if Abbott’s directive delays the final issuance of that permit, it should not prevent Childress from continuing to operate or build. The backup generator fleet also appears to be authorized through Texas’ permit-by-rule framework, which would explain why there are no individual preconstruction air permits sitting in TCEQ’s queue for the freeze to catch. In other words, I currently struggle to find anything at Childress that this new directive materially disrupts. Sweetwater is where there is at least some real regulatory exposure, but even there I think the headline sounds considerably worse than the underlying situation. The 2 GW campus already made it into ERCOT’s Batch Zero under the much stronger Base Load classification, and the main remaining gate is the ongoing verification process before future load can be energized. ERCOT currently expects to finish that process in December, with its Batch Zero verification report due by December 10. Meanwhile, the major AI capacity at Sweetwater 1 isn’t targeted to come online until Q4 2027. So even if this process costs $IREN a few months on certain approvals, there is still a very large buffer between where we are today and when the capacity is actually supposed to be delivered. Obviously, that changes if December turns into March, March turns into June, or the state starts adding entirely new hurdles after the audit. But based on what we know today, I don’t see a temporary pause measured in months materially changing the Sweetwater timeline. The temporary nature of this latest move is also worth keeping in mind. TCEQ has to report back to Abbott by October 19, while ERCOT’s audit is expected to wrap up in December. The freeze is tied to that process, so this is not currently an indefinite moratorium on Texas data center development. There is also a political element here that I think is difficult to ignore. Data centers have become an increasingly easy target in Texas over electricity prices, water usage and public infrastructure costs, and Abbott has repeatedly stepped up the rhetoric over the past couple of months. The US midterm elections are on November 3, with Abbott himself up for re-election. My read is that a meaningful portion of what we are seeing right now is political posturing into the election. The incentive to keep escalating falls considerably once the vote is over, while the ERCOT audit provides a natural path toward de-escalation only a few weeks later. That doesn’t mean the broader regulatory shift should be ignored. For $IREN, though, the real risk is more about additional permitting friction, audits and political intervention slowing projects down than some sudden change in project economics. Texas has been $IREN's bread and butter for years, well before the current AI boom, and I doubt many operators know how to navigate the state’s permitting, grid and local stakeholder environment better than this management team. Add to that the company’s track record as a strong community steward, which I laid out in yesterday’s post, and I think $IREN enters this new regulatory climate from a much stronger position than most developers. But there is another side to that equation for companies already well positioned. Every earlier-stage project that gets delayed by this process is capacity that arrives later into an already tight compute market. If competing projects slip while $IREN continues building on schedule, the scarcity value of its existing infrastructure and advanced pipeline only increases. Less capacity reaching the market, all else being equal, also supports rental pricing for the compute that does. So there is a scenario where Abbott’s crackdown ends up being marginally positive for the developers that entered this process years ahead of everyone else. And that is largely where $IREN sits today. One final point concerns IR. This should be an incredibly easy win for the company. Put out a short statement explaining what, if anything, the new directive changes at Childress and Sweetwater, then reaffirm the relevant construction timelines. So while the headline reads bearish, $IREN's actual position appears much stronger. Leaving that gap for investors to fill with their own assumptions would be another completely avoidable own goal. @danroberts0101 @MikePowerX

$IREN's community engagement is underrated Ever since the political climate in the US started turning against data centers, a lot of developers have suddenly discovered the importance of calling themselves "good community stewards." But contributing to local communities goes much deeper than handing out grants once opposition starts building. A few $IREN bulls and I had the opportunity to visit the Childress site last year, and one thing became very obvious after spending several hours with management: $IREN takes community engagement extremely seriously. One of the key people behind that effort in the US is @nicoletakespics (Nicole Dill), $IREN's Community and Employee Relations Manager, who we had the chance to spend several hours with alongside operations leadership. She walked us through the multi-step approach $IREN takes around every site, and I genuinely think the company has built something close to the gold standard here. That matters because it increasingly insulates $IREN from a category of political and community risk that is becoming much more relevant across the industry. For one, you cannot expect local residents to embrace you with open arms if you build a giant data center right on their doorstep. Since day one, $IREN has deliberately targeted sites well away from dense residential areas. That obviously creates a trade-off around latency, which is why the fiber piece matters so much. $IREN selects sites with strong fiber connectivity into major network hubs such as Dallas, allowing it to build remotely without sacrificing the connectivity required for AI workloads. That combination is one reason I believe $IREN's secured power portfolio deserves to be valued at a premium. You are not "just" getting hundreds of megawatts of low-cost power, all of it sourced from renewable-heavy grids.... You are getting power, land, fiber connectivity and physical separation from residential communities all in the same package. That overall setup is much harder to replicate than any single component on its own. The next layer is local procurement. One thing management emphasized during our visit was how aggressively they try to source materials locally. And that does not stop with the data center halls themselves. It goes all the way down to the office buildings on site, from lumber and concrete to furniture and other materials wherever possible. To rural communities that means a great deal. Many of these local economies are built around tradespeople, contractors and small businesses. When a project the size of Childress arrives and starts directing procurement toward those businesses, the economic impact spreads far beyond the people directly employed by $IREN. The same philosophy applies to labor. $IREN prioritizes local contractors and workers wherever possible and has built strong relationships with many of them over time. The way it was explained to us was almost like a radius system. Start as close to the site as possible for labor and materials, and only expand outward once local supply can no longer meet the requirement. That is very different from simply defaulting to a handful of large national suppliers and flying outside contractors into town. Then you have the more visible side of community engagement through grants, donations and direct support. $IREN has supported local schools, youth sports, fire departments, food programs, community events, First Nations organizations and various nonprofits across the communities surrounding its sites. And sometimes that support is much more immediate. @FransBakker9812 just reported that $IREN has been delivering pallets of drinking water to residents across Childress County, with @nicoletakespics helping coordinate the logistics behind the operation. That is the difference I think investors should understand. $IREN is NOT trying to write a few checks after community resistance appears. Instead it has built community engagement into the development model from the ground up, starting with where the site gets built, then extending through procurement, labor and direct community support. We are still in the early innings of the data center boom, and I do not think the market assigns much value to this yet. But over time, I think that changes... As more projects run into permitting delays, political resistance and hostile local communities, the reputation of individual developers will matter a lot more. And I think this is one area where $IREN has quietly positioned itself extremely well. Being known as the developer that communities actually want around could eventually translate into a very real competitive advantage when it comes to building out a massive multi-gigawatt pipeline. $IREN's community engagement shows that there are levels to this, and most developers simply aren't up to par.

Must-read for every $IREN investor For anyone who hasn’t seen it yet, I believe this is one of the most important pieces we’ve published in a while. It’s an excerpt from our recent $IREN earnings breakdown, published as a standalone X article, completely free and available to everyone. The article covers what I consider the single most important new development at $IREN; its evolving financing strategy, which is increasingly shaping up to be a real moat. Understanding this is imperative for every $IREN investor because it materially changes both the potential upside in the stock and the risk profile of the thesis, all of which is laid out in detail throughout the article. The piece also includes plenty of custom-made graphics designed to help visualize some of the more intricate parts of the financing structure from start to finish, making the topic much easier to digest. So once again, if you’re an $IREN investor, aren’t subscribed to us on X or Substack, and haven’t read the article yet, I strongly recommend doing so. And if you have read it already, I’d love to hear your feedback in the comments. Cheers! 🫶

Beautiful daily & weekly closes on $IREN. I feel like we’re close to another major run-up in the stock. $IREN is simply too undervalued for it not to violently re-rate eventually. 📈

Here's the Link to Substack: agrippa.investments/p/iren-n…

Rental prices on compute are going nuts $NBIS just raised its on-demand pricing for B300s by over 20%, to $9.50 per GPU hour. Now, before investors fixate on the price tag itself, let me make clear that we’re talking about “on-demand” pricing. This category consists of very short-term commitments, ranging from a few days to a few months. Typically, the longer the commitment, the lower the price, so naturally these types of contracts command the highest rates. It’s also worth pointing out that $NBIS, like any provider, uses anchor pricing as part of its sales process. Depending on the individual deployment, actual realized pricing will likely come in somewhat lower on average. That said, this is still a very strong signal of just how tight the market for compute remains. Rental prices have consistently moved higher, with little sign of slowing down. I’m glad that $IREN still has over 90% of its 2027 capacity uncontracted. Management appears to have played its contracting strategy extremely well, while many investors were complaining that $IREN wasn’t locking up large chunks of its 2027 pipeline in lower-yielding hyperscaler contracts. In this market environment, having 500 MW (IT) of capacity coming online over the next 12-14 months while retaining significant flexibility over who gets it and at what price is an incredibly valuable position to be in. $IREN may be sitting on a golden goose.

Agrippa X Subscription We just launched our new X subscription. The subscription includes the same research and coverage we already offer through our paid Advanced Substack tier: • Deep dives on $IREN and the broader AI landscape • In-depth $IREN earnings coverage • Long-term $IREN price targets (coming soon) • Radar Reports on undervalued hyper-growth stocks • Proprietary financial models • Exclusive Discord access X subscribers also get access to the full library of research we’ve published over the past year, not just everything we release going forward. Ever since joining Substack last year, we’ve regularly heard from followers who wanted access to our paywalled research but preferred to stay entirely within X rather than use another platform. The new X subscription solves exactly that. For anyone who is new here or hasn’t subscribed through Substack before, here’s what our research is built around: We focus on a small number of high-conviction stocks and aim to provide unparalleled depth of coverage in a format that is easy to understand and actually useful for making better investment decisions. We’re not interested in covering hundreds of companies at surface level. The goal is to identify exceptional hyper-growth businesses early, build conviction through deep research, and then continue covering them in detail as the story develops. We covered $HIMS when barely anyone was talking about the name and the stock was still trading in the single digits. We’ve been covering $IREN since it was trading at $4.80 two years ago, and it remains our core focus today. At the same time, we’re constantly looking for the next overlooked opportunity. That’s exactly why we created our Radar Report series, where we dig into smaller, under-the-radar hyper-growth companies that we believe deserve closer attention. Over time, as conviction builds in some of these names, we expect our core coverage to expand beyond $IREN and the broader AI infrastructure landscape. The mission is ultimately to give investors all the relevant information, context and ongoing analysis they need to make better investment decisions, without making the research unnecessarily complicated. For existing Substack subscribers, absolutely nothing changes. We’re simply making the same research available to an X-native audience through X Articles. To kick off the launch, we’ll be releasing a new $IREN / Anthropic deep dive later today, exclusively for X and Substack subscribers. More on that new report very soon. Cheers!