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<\/p>\nTheir early bitcoin adventure proved instructive. \u201cWe invested first in bitcoin in 2013 on its run up to $1,000, and then it dropped to $500, and we shat ourselves, sold it all and thought, silly, magic internet money,\u201d Daniel said.<\/p>\n
But a few years later, he reconsidered. \u201cI was reading about monetary history and gold, and I figured there\u2019s only 21 million of these things. It feels like it\u2019s going to continue going up in value, particularly if governments continue to print lots of money.\u201d<\/p>\n
So they quit their corporate jobs and founded Iren in 2018 with an ambitious thesis around the digitisation of society. \u201cWe love our sci-fi movies, like The Matrix, Ready Player One, Wreck it Ralph,\u201d Daniel said. \u201cAnd we quoted these movies when we were out raising our seed investment round, just to elicit visualisations for investors. As society is heading that way, directionally, it\u2019s going to drive this insatiable appetite for compute.\u201d<\/p>\n
The brothers donned backpacks and started travelling the world looking for places that had built more renewable energy than they could use. They were adamant about a principle that would define their business: they\u2019d only use electrons going to waste, never power that families needed.\u200b<\/p>\n
\u201cWe looked in Europe. But the political sensitivity was high. We went to Iceland. We were looking through the lens of what problems could we solve? Taking baseload geothermal power in Iceland wasn\u2019t solving a problem for that market,\u201d Daniel said.\u200b<\/p>\n
Their search took them through rural Canada and eventually to Childress County, Texas – 400 kilometres from the nearest city – where wind and solar farms had been built with government subsidies that far exceeded transmission capacity.\u200b\u200b<\/p>\n
\u201cSo we came in and said, \u2018Right, we\u2019ll use up this power. We\u2019ll pay your market price and put downward pressure on power prices\u2019,\u201d Roberts explained. They rehired laid-off mill workers and retrained them to run data centres.<\/p>\n
Rejection and rock bottom<\/p>\n
In November 2021, riding bitcoin\u2019s pandemic-era surge, Iris Energy listed on the Nasdaq at $US28 a share, valuing the company at $US1.55 billion. The ASX had rejected their listing application.<\/p>\n
\u201cAfter the brown cardigans at the ASX rejected us due to their anti-technology stance, IREN – now ASX100 scale – was forced to list overseas,\u201d Daniel wrote on LinkedIn at the time. \u201cI know others haven\u2019t even bothered trying locally as a result.\u201d<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Data centres are power hungry and the use of artificial intelligence is running up huge energy bills.Credit: iStock<\/p>\n
When asked about the rejection now in an interview, Roberts is philosophical. \u201cThey make decisions they think are wise at the moment,\u201d he said. \u201cUS capital markets have opened up an enormous opportunity for us, and maybe things happen for a reason, but we haven\u2019t looked back.\u201d<\/p>\n
Days after listing on the Nasdaq, bitcoin crashed. Interest rates soared. The brothers watched helplessly as their share price entered freefall, bottoming at $US1.06 in December 2022.\u200b\u200b<\/p>\n
It was during this crisis that Daniel\u2019s kidney cancer was discovered. Since bottoming in 2022, Iren shares have surged more than 580 per cent this year alone. The company is now valued at $16.52 billion, larger than Qantas.\u200b\u200b<\/p>\n
Each brother is currently worth about $1.06 billion, making 35-year-old Will one of the ten richest Australians under 40.\u200b\u200b<\/p>\n
Wall Street validation<\/p>\n
The $US9.7 billion ($14.8 billion) Microsoft contract, which will make the tech giant Iren\u2019s biggest customer, has sent analysts scrambling to raise price targets. B. Riley Securities called the deal a \u201cvalidation of Iren\u2019s vertically integrated strategy,\u201d expecting it to generate $US1.94 billion in annualised revenue with 85 per cent EBITDA margins. The firm raised its target price to $US74.\u200b<\/p>\n
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Roth Capital Partners revised its price target upward to $US94, noting that the Microsoft deal \u201cbrings a level of credibility we believe investors were looking for\u201d. Cantor Fitzgerald was more bullish, lifting its target to $US142 and calling the deal \u201cgame-changing\u201d, noting that Iren could replicate this deal \u201cseveral times over\u201d across its remaining capacity.\u200b<\/p>\n
The common theme among analysts: Iren lacked a tier-1 anchor tenant before Monday. Now it has Microsoft, arguably the strongest possible validation.<\/p>\n
What excites Roberts most is the scale of what lies ahead. \u201cWe\u2019ve got 3,000 megawatts of power secured that we can offer to clients such as Microsoft,\u201d he told this masthead. \u201cThis deal is 10 per cent of that. So in some respects, it\u2019s back to work, continuing other conversations and making the most of the opportunity in front of us.\u201d<\/p>\n
Australia\u2019s missed opportunity?<\/p>\n
The Microsoft deal\u2019s significance extends beyond the Roberts brothers\u2019 personal fortunes or Iren\u2019s share price. It highlights what many see as a missed opportunity for Australia\u2019s technology sector.\u200b\u200b<\/p>\n
Iren currently operates 810 megawatts of data centre capacity, with another 2.1 gigawatts under construction in North America. That\u2019s roughly equivalent to Australia\u2019s entire existing data centre capacity of 1.5 gigawatts, with another 1.6 gigawatts in the pipeline across the entire country.\u200b\u200b<\/p>\n
Roberts is direct about Australia\u2019s predicament. \u201cWe absolutely haven\u2019t missed it, but we absolutely could miss it,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
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\u201cWe sit here today looking back over the multi-decade resource boom, and lament sending all these commodities offshore for other people to add value and monetise. We are sitting here with the exact same opportunity in front of us now for the fourth industrial revolution.<\/p>\n
We\u2019ve got an abundance of natural resources, the ability to produce enormous amounts of renewable energy, all we need to do is to monetise that into a more refined product, like compute, and export it. And it\u2019s a huge opportunity.\u201d<\/p>\n
But Australia is making it unnecessarily hard. \u201cPart of the reason we\u2019re offshore is Australia is very slow and very hard to do things,\u201d Daniel explained. \u201cFor some reason we think at times that we\u2019re so far away from everyone else that maybe we don\u2019t have to be as quick, nimble and as competitive as other countries do.\u201d <\/p>\n
Atlassian co-founder Scott Farquhar recently argued at the National Press Club that Australia has the land and renewable energy to become a regional AI computing hub if it can streamline approvals and address skilled labor shortages. Iren is currently hiring for 50 roles, but only one is based in its Sydney headquarters. The rest are in North America, where permits take months instead of years.\u200b\u200b<\/p>\n
\u201cIn the US, a lot of that Federal power is decentralised among the states,\u201d Daniel said. \u201cWhat that does is create more competition at a state level… it\u2019s much more of a meritocracy.\u201d<\/p>\n
Daniel says working alongside his brother has been critical to Iren\u2019s success. \u201cHe\u2019s definitely the better brother,\u201d he said. \u201cWhen I say two heads are better than one, and when you\u2019ve got a lot of deep-seated alignment and passion, the ability to punch through problems together – we absolutely wouldn\u2019t be where we are individually, that\u2019s for sure.\u201d<\/p>\n
For now, the brothers are focused on executing their Microsoft contract. The GPUs will be deployed through 2026 at the company\u2019s 750-megawatt Childress campus, generating approximately $1.94 billion in annual revenue.\u200b<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a stunning turnaround for a company that nearly went under, led by brothers who turned a broken rib and a brush with cancer into billion-dollar fortunes.<\/p>\n
With Bloomberg<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Their early bitcoin adventure proved instructive. \u201cWe invested first in bitcoin in 2013 on its run up to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":266586,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[256,254,255,64,63,105],"class_list":{"0":"post-266585","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-au","12":"tag-australia","13":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/266585","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=266585"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/266585\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/266586"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=266585"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=266585"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=266585"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}