$IREN Cloud's largest ever customer, PoolsideAI, just announced a massive deal with CoreWeave
$CRWV.
For some backdrop,
$IREN launched their cloud offering in early 2024, and secured Poolside as their first (and only) marquee customer logo on a short-term contract than ran through September 2024. In September 2024, Poolside chose NOT to renew their contract with
$IREN cloud.
$IREN cloud's revenue fell from $3.2MM in Q3-24 to $2.7MM in Q4-24.
As far as I'm aware, IREN Cloud is the only neocloud to have reported a quarter of declining sequential revenue in the history of the neocloud industry.
$IREN bulls have claimed that this non-renewal was because Poolside needed a larger cluster, and now, with their larger GPU fleet,
$IREN was well positioned to win-back Poolside.
$IREN bulls pointed towards the RAISE Summit in August 2025, whereby Poolside's CEO and IREN's CTO attended a fireside chat together. They told me repeatedly that this "relationship" was rekindling, and that
$IREN would yet again secure Poolside as a customer. Instead, Poolside has gone to CoreWeave for it's cloud computing needs.
What is most ironic about the press release is this quote from Poolside CEO Eiso Kant
@eisokant:
“It is not about your headline numbers of gigawatts. It’s about your ability to deliver data centers. The ability to build data centers quickly is the real physical bottleneck in our industry.”
I have been told ad nauseum that
$IREN has all of these gigawatts of "grid-secured power" - Kant seems to be suggesting that
$IREN's touted headlines of gigawatts are completely and utterly meaningless and irrelevant. Why isn't Poolside going to
$IREN, if
$IREN has 2GW of "grid-secured capacity" available at Sweetwater, and all of this expertise in data center design and construction? Hm.
I have been told that because
$IREN owns a few plots of dirt in Texas, they are a "vertically integrated neocloud", and that this advantage would allow them to scale. These same people told me CoreWeave was doomed because they "don't own their land, power, and other infrastructure."
Yet CoreWeave just landed a massive contract with a massive AI Company who churned from
$IREN cloud, and is deciding to build their own data center with CoreWeave instead. I wonder why Poolside chose CoreWeave, and not
$IREN, for this partnership.
This narrative around
$IREN have some sort of mythological competitive advantage over CoreWeave because of their "vertical integration" is now, of course, completely de-bunked.
CoreWeave is currently doing $5B of ARR.
$IREN cloud is at $28MM.
CoreWeave landed $26B of deals with Meta, OpenAI, and Nvidia in the last month or so alone. CoreWeave now just landed another large deal with
$IREN's former customer. Meanwhile,
$IREN is still seeking to sign contracts for the GPUs they purchase on-spec. Read the
$IREN 10-K - they quite literally tell you they purchase GPUs, and then try to find customers.
$IREN currently trades at 15x+ forward revenue, vs. <10x for
$CRWV. The majority of IREN's forward revenue still comes from Bitcoin mining, which is obviously extremely low-quality revenue, given it is set to fall 50% at the 2028 Bitcoin halving. Nearly 100% of CoreWeave's forward revenue, on the other hand, is derived from long-term, committed contracts, from companies such as Microsoft, OpenAI, Meta, Nvidia, and.... PoolsideAI.