Iren Limited has secured another major debt facility to acquire Nvidia's latest GPUs, with private credit firm Blue Owl Capital writing the largest check.

Blue Owl led a $2.4 billion tranche within a broader $2.8 billion GPU financing package that closed in August 2026. The non-investment-grade equipment financing carries a 9% fixed rate — equivalent to roughly $216 million per year in interest on the $2.4 billion tranche at the stated rate — and will fund air-cooled Nvidia GPU deployments at Iren's facility in Mackenzie, British Columbia. As equipment financing, the debt is secured by the GPUs themselves, an approach still young enough that lenders are effectively treating cutting-edge chips as a collateral class.

GPUs as collateral: a new asset class

The deal extends a substantial fundraising campaign. On June 1, 2026, Iren closed a separate $3.65 billion investment-grade GPU financing package backed by a substantial Microsoft offtake contract. That earlier transaction earned A/A(low) ratings from Fitch and DBRS and covers roughly 96% of $5.81 billion in GPU expenditure, primarily directed toward Iren's Childress, Texas campus.

Taken together, Iren has secured more than $6.5 billion in GPU-specific financing over just the past several months. Over the past year, the company has raised or secured approximately $19 billion in total capital to fund GPU acquisitions and data center expansion across North America — a scale of fundraising that underscores how capital-intensive the AI buildout has become, with the cost of debt now a key variable in data center economics.

Borrowing against GPUs at this scale is a recent phenomenon: AI cloud provider CoreWeave borrowed $2.3 billion against its Nvidia H100 chips in 2023, and Iren's transactions show how quickly the market for GPU-backed debt has grown since.

From Bitcoin miner to AI infrastructure operator

Iren's trajectory is among the more dramatic corporate pivots in recent memory. The company began as a Bitcoin mining operation before repositioning toward AI cloud infrastructure, building relationships with Nvidia and major hyperscalers such as Microsoft along the way. That path mirrors a wider migration across the mining sector, where operators holding powered land and grid connections have converted capacity toward AI hosting amid heavy demand for compute-ready sites.

Iren is now developing data center campuses in British Columbia (Mackenzie, Prince George, and Canal Flats) and in Texas (Childress and Sweetwater). Its facilities run fleets of Nvidia B300 and Blackwell-generation systems. The company's stated goal is to reach 480 MW of AI cloud capacity by the end of 2026, with ambitions to expand into multi-gigawatt territory.

Private credit's AI infrastructure wager

Blue Owl's leading role reflects a shift in how AI infrastructure is funded. Traditional banks have been cautious about lending against rapidly depreciating technology assets, while private credit firms have been far less hesitant.

At a 9% fixed rate on the Blue Owl tranche, Iren is paying a meaningful premium over investment-grade borrowing. The investment-grade tranche that closed in June carried more favorable terms precisely because the Microsoft contract de-risked it. The August deal, aimed at the Mackenzie campus, lacks that same anchor tenant visibility, which is reflected in its higher rate and non-investment-grade designation.

For Blue Owl, which manages more than $250 billion in assets, the deal represents a bet that AI infrastructure demand will remain robust enough for Iren to service its debt. The markers ahead for Iren are concrete: execution against the 480 MW capacity target, any tenant announcement that would give Mackenzie the anchor visibility Childress already has, and how the company funds the multi-gigawatt expansion it has outlined.