Iris Energy Is Positioned to Become One of the Biggest Listed Bitcoin Miners: Canaccord

• Iris Energy is poised to become one of the biggest listed bitcoin miners with HPC optionality, broker Canaccord says. 
• Canaccord raised its Iris Energy share-price target to $15 from $12.
• The bitcoin miner has ample power supplies and high-performance computing options, the report said.
• Iris can monetize the infrastructure it is building for bitcoin mining, cloud computing and AI colocation, the broker said.

Iris Energy (IREN) is positioned to become the most efficient and one of the biggest publicly listed bitcoin {{BTC}} miners, with options in high-performance computing (HPC) as it starts its pilot in Childress, Texas in the second half of the year, broker Canaccord said in a research report on Tuesday.

As the Sydney-based company scales its business, there are very few bitcoin miners with the same amount of power at their disposal, the report said.

“The company is building 510 megawatts (MW) of data centers in 2024, secured 2,160 MW of power capacity, and has a 1 gigawatt (GW) plus development pipeline,” analysts led by Joseph Vafi wrote.

The broker raised its share-price target for the company to $15 from $12 while maintaining its buy rating. Iris Energy was trading 1.6% higher at $11.06 in early Wednesday trading on Nasdaq.

Mining stocks have rerated in recent months following Core Scientific’s (CORZ) artificial intelligence (AI) deal with cloud computing firm CoreWeave. 

This suggests that the market thinks AI and HPC opportunities could offer alternative and more accretive use cases for bitcoin mining sites, Wall Street giant JPMorgan (JPM) said in a report last week.

Earlier this month, Iris Energy shares slumped 14% after a short seller said the Childress site was not suitable for hosting artificial intelligence or high-performance computing. They are still priced well below the pre-slump level of almost $14.

Given that Iris Energy is primarily an infrastructure company, “we think management will be opportunistic in expanding the use case for its data centers beyond bitcoin mining and is well-prepared from a power, cooling, and network perspective,” Canaccord wrote.

Bitcoin mining is a proven value proposition for Iris Energy and also helps to pay for infrastructure build outs, the note said.

There are several ways the company can monetize the infrastructure it is building, “including bitcoin mining, AI cloud, and AI colocation,” the report added.