IREN Secures $2.4B to Buy Nvidia Blackwell Ultra GPUs
IREN has secured $2.4 billion in financing led by Blue Owl Capital to purchase Nvidia Blackwell Ultra GPUs, proving the viability of asset-backed debt models for scaling AI infrastructure.
On August 28, 2026, alternative asset manager Blue Owl Capital announced it is leading a $2.4 billion equipment financing deal for IREN Limited. The capital will fund the purchase of air-cooled Nvidia Blackwell Ultra GPUs for IREN's Mackenzie data center campus in British Columbia, Canada. Structured to match hardware delivery schedules, the financing consists of a $1.2 billion senior secured term loan and $1.2 billion in senior secured notes.
The facility, which includes Pacific Investment Management Company LLC as an adviser, carries a 9.0% fixed interest rate. It covers 90% of the GPU capital expenditures for the Mackenzie expansion, fitting into a broader $2.8 billion GPU financing pool targeting non-investment grade customer deployments. This sits alongside IREN's other major projects, including a $3.6 billion investment-grade GPU financing at a 6.0% weighted average interest rate tied to its Microsoft contract. That contract supported IREN's first 50MW liquid-cooled deployment at Childress, Texas, in August 2026.
For AI practitioners and developers, this massive capital injection ensures a steady, predictable supply of high-performance compute. IREN, which operates a global data center pipeline exceeding 5GW, reported $4 billion in contracted annualized run-rate revenue for its 2026 capacity, with $1 billion in operating annualized run-rate revenue as of August 26, 2026. Because its 2026 capacity is already largely sold out, this structured financing model allows IREN to scale up physical infrastructure in lockstep with hardware commissioning.
This transaction highlights a shifting financial landscape for AI infrastructure. Rather than relying solely on venture equity, operators are increasingly using asset-backed debt. The software-driven portability of CUDA makes these GPU clusters highly fungible assets. This fungibility lowers risk for lenders like Blue Owl, which manages $319 billion in assets, and establishes a repeatable blueprint for funding massive AI factories globally.
This is our own summary of reporting by Unite.AI
