IREN Plunges as Microsoft Tightens Scrutiny of Computing Power Projects, Rebounds Sharply 13% After Earnings

BlockBeats news, November 6 - Affected by project delivery delays, regulatory hurdles, and rising costs, Microsoft is withdrawing from some projects it deems high-risk. Bloomberg, citing people familiar with the matter, reported that Microsoft is strengthening its review of certain data center projects involving Nebius, IREN, and Nscale, and is reassessing whether to sign new cooperation agreements. Following the news, combined with the overall market pullback, IREN closed down 16.95% in U.S. stocks last night, Nebius closed down 14.94%, and CoreWeave also fell about 10%.

IREN subsequently announced its fiscal year 2027 first quarter results, with quarterly revenue up 66% quarter-over-quarter to $228 million, of which AI cloud revenue grew 182% quarter-over-quarter to $200 million, and the AI cloud business gross margin was approximately 86%. The company also disclosed that its revenue backlog increased to $20.3 billion, up 22% quarter-over-quarter.

Delivery progress still requires adjustment. The company has delivered its first Horizon 1 data center to Microsoft and obtained NVIDIA Exemplar certification; the target of more than $4 billion in annualized revenue (ARR) has been contracted and funded, but due to customer-requested design adjustments and changes in supplier delivery timelines, the target originally set to be achieved by the end of this year has been postponed to January 2027, and may be delayed until the end of February at the latest.

As of press time, the IREN contract on Hyperliquid was quoted at $20.43, rebounding about 13.3% from the U.S. regular trading close of $18.03; during the same period, the NBIS contract rose about 3.2%.

Trading activity has also increased significantly. The IREN contract's trading volume over the past 24 hours was about $20.81 million, an increase of about 219% from $6.51 million in the previous 24 hours; NBIS trading volume increased from about $43.22 million to $90.53 million, an increase of about 109%.