Reggie Smith, Morgan Stanley head of FinTech Research came to this conclusion.
11 Likes
IREN is going through a fear storm. Logic is needed to keep fear at bay. There are a number of X accounts that really have IREN dialed in. One of them is @Litigious_Dulce. Here are two items that he posted today that layout IREN’s strategy, opportunities, and advantages:
12 Likes
Another X account: @Kamahsutra refutes the Morgan Stanely downgrade point by point:
16 Likes
Morgan Stanley has a large enough reach that their downgrade of a company can easily send a company down over 10% on huge volume. Since they acquired Etrade years ago, they now access that client base of MS + Etrade where you get the large institutional clients that MS has, and also a large base of momentum traders on Etrade because they are known for the best executions on trades. This ends up having an incredibly powerful effect as the institutional side sells, and the traders all pile in under the “trend is your friend” theory.
You can see from those Twitter threads the take from Morgan Stanley is naive at best. It still stands out to me from back after Astera Labs went public, MS was the only analyst that was not Buy or Strong Buy. They kept putting out cases that the company would be unsuccessful, demonstrating their complete lack of understanding of tech companies and the industries they operate in.
From my perspective these are great opportunities to rotate between top holdings. Yesterday I trimmed IREN and added to Astera Labs. For all the fear spread, there hasn’t been a poor result from IREN or Astera. Both of their last reports showed sales and profitability are both growing despite the concerns that analysts have.
30 Likes
The aforementioned @Litigious_Dulce articulates very clearly how the business of owning and operating data centers is evolving, and gives a roadmap of how IREN can position itself to capture an increasing larger portion of the value chain.
12 Likes
The stock is up 80% in the past month. When I bought at $18 last month, I wasn’t worried about it “dropping” to $41 a month later. Reminder that we don’t need to check stock prices every day.
26 Likes
IREN releases monthly updates about the number of Bitcoin mined, avergae price of BTC sold, AI Cloud revenue and cost of said mining. As @wpr101 mentioned in his introduction post, it is one of the reasons IREN is attractive-A monthly cadence of health checks than a quarterly cadence like most other companies we follow. They usually release this 7 days after the month ends.
However I don’t see any such monthly update for September and it’s been 3 weeks already. Is there any update i missed where they said they will be releasing late or skipping this month etc..?
8 Likes
I believe they were giving updates mostly on getting up to 50 exahash for their Bitcoin mining operations, and in their last two updates they reached that milestone. If you look back at the July update it was 41 exahash, and then 50 for August and September. It was a bit of a weird arrangement to pre-report each month like this as it leaves not much to report on earnings, since you could sum up their last three updates.
15 Likes
In IREN’s Oct 7th announcement, they say:
“With the business continuing to evolve, IREN will transition to a standardized reporting process consistent with industry peers and monthly operating updates will be discontinued.“
So there won’t be any monthly # of bitcoin announcement in the future. Instead of seeing this as an attempt to “downplay” their Bitcoin business, it’s more likely a strategic repositioning. They are signaling to the market that they are evolving from being just a Bitcoin miner into a vertically integrated infrastructure company for high-performance computing (HPC) and Artificial Intelligence.
This shift is arguably a positive development. IREN’s core strength lies in its low-cost energy and power infrastructure—it has 810 MW of operational data center capacity and has secured nearly 3 GW of total contracted power. This is the key asset that underpins its growth.
(As a comparison, Google Clouds consume an average of over 3.5 GW every hour. This is not a completely fair comparison, but it shows you that IREN is not just “a tiny bitcoin miner” compared with the big clouds.)
The investment thesis here is that IREN is using its advantage as a low-cost energy provider to expand into the high-demand AI compute market. The current valuation may look like a steal because the market is still largely valuing it as a Bitcoin miner, not as the high-growth AI infrastructure company it is quickly becoming.
19 Likes
A remark on the terminology: “GW” is already a time-based unit (1 Watt = 1 Joule/second), so I would say “Google Cloud has an average power usage of 3.5 GW”.
7 Likes
Just in case IREN investors are wondering why the stock has dropped yesterday and today:
British Columbia (Canadian province) changing how electricity capacity is doled out - from first-come, first-served to a bidding process for a “fixed 100MW of power every year.” And making permanent a ban on using electricity to mine crypto.
Roth Capital analyst Darren Aftahi believes that the new development will not affect IREN. The five-star analyst noted that IREN has 180 megawatts of capacity, giving it leverage over new market entrants.
Aftahi, therefore, raised his price target on IREN stock to $82 per share, representing almost 50% upside.
22 Likes
Was just taking a look at that electricity ban on Bitcoin in British Columbia and the story does not seem as bad as I originally thought. I learned the ban started in 2022, but this is extending the ban to be permanent. Companies like IREN or HIVE which had operations prior to 2022 were grandfathered in and allowed to continue to mine with their current capacity. Apparently the hydro-electric there is super cheap and coveted, but there is limited supply they can bring online in the near term. The province also stated they want the electricity to go to industries which are more job creation friendly such as the oil and natural gas companies in the area.
It sounds like the fixed 100MW is related to AI HPC capacity that can be brought online, and this is completely new to the regulations which starts in 2026. With IREN, my understanding is they were already looking to wind down the Bitcoin operations in BC and move that to Texas.
For HIVE, some of their Canadian mining capacity is in Toronto which has different rules than BC. Additionally, HIVE recently expanded it’s capacity in Paraguay to over 400 MW and it seems extremely business friendly down there.
Overall this news seems to be not as bad I originally thought when I incorrectly read it as all of Canada was banning Bitcoin mining and limiting new HPC.
41 Likes
Reggie Smith works for JP Morgan not Morgan Stanley
1 Like