IREN Ltd. shares climbed more than 14% over two sessions as institutional demand for its AI cloud infrastructure accelerated. Bernstein analyst Gautam Chhugani issued a bullish 12-month outlook expecting the stock to rally toward a new all-time high, reinforcing the AI-compute thesis for the bitcoin miner turned cloud provider.
A two-day advance of more than 14% has pushed IREN shares higher as institutions piled into the company's AI cloud infrastructure business, and Bernstein's Gautam Chhugani now expects the stock to reach a fresh record high over the next 12 months.
Chhugani, an analyst at Bernstein, issued a bullish 12-month outlook on the Nasdaq-listed company, framing IREN's AI cloud business as the primary driver of the stock's next leg higher, according to the firm's research.
IREN holds approximately $4 billion of contracted annual recurring revenue from AI cloud customers, with current negotiations approaching $25 million of annual revenue per megawatt. Three-year contract pricing has risen 125% since November, and customer prepayments now cover roughly 45% to 55% of GPU capital expenditure, reducing the equity intensity of the company's expansion, according to a Seeking Alpha analysis.
The surge places IREN at the center of the AI-compute and bitcoin-mining convergence trade, where miners repurpose power infrastructure for GPU cloud services. The stock trades near 5.75 times forward enterprise value to sales, below CoreWeave's 7.2 times and well under Nebius at approximately 17.6 times, leaving room for multiple expansion if contracted revenue converts to cash flow.
The rally follows a period of sustained institutional accumulation in IREN, which pivoted from pure bitcoin mining toward AI cloud services. The contracted ARR base of $4 billion represents a shift from confirming market demand to funding infrastructure build-out, with customer prepayments underwriting a substantial portion of GPU costs.
Bernstein's endorsement adds to a growing list of sell-side firms viewing the miner-to-cloud transition as a structural re-rating opportunity. The stock's path toward its prior all-time high will depend on execution against the contracted pipeline and the pace of new customer wins at current pricing levels.
The AI cloud market's scarcity of power-constrained data center capacity has driven contract pricing sharply higher, with IREN's three-year deals up 125% since November. That pricing power, combined with prepayment structures, gives the company clearer visibility on capital efficiency than traditional data center operators.
Investors will watch for updates on new contract signings and GPU deployment timelines in coming quarters. The company's next earnings report will test whether contracted AI cloud revenue converts to cash flow as management has guided, and whether the stock can sustain its momentum toward the prior record high.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.
