All,
I think direct comparisons with NBIS or CRWV are of limited value. IREN main product is in the data center without GPUs. So they will be selling at different rates than what NBIS and CRWV. I do think IREN wants to get into the market that NBIS and CRWV are in but I think they want to get there while being profitable. To get their I also believe IREN will have to increase the number of employees to provide the higher caliber of service those types of customers expect.
I don’t think EBITDA is the best metric for businesses built on expensive, short-lived assets. In these models, depreciation isn’t just an accounting technicality — it’s one of the largest real costs. The GPUs (or other high-cost hardware) are booked as capital expenditures on the cash flow statement, but once purchased, they show up as depreciation in the income statement.
If you ignore depreciation by looking only at EBITDA, you’re effectively leaving out one of the company’s biggest expenses. To really understand the economics, you need to look at both depreciation and ongoing capex in the cash flow statement.
In most industries, I like EBITDA because GAAP depreciation often runs faster than economic depreciation — meaning EBITDA can give a cleaner picture of core operations. But in this industry, the opposite is true: the assets lose value quickly in practice, so depreciation is much closer to a real expense.
Drew