Vole has inked a $9.7 billion deal with bitcoin miner and data centre operator IREN to grab access to thousands of Nvidia GB300 GPUs for its expanding cloud empire.

The five-year deal gives Redmond the sort of raw computing power that only a company swimming in cash can buy. The hardware will live in IREN’s vast Texas data campus in Childress.

IREN’s shareholders went into a frenzy, pushing the stock up 22 per cent in pre-market trading to $73.98. The cocaine nose jobs of Wall Street clearly approved of turning crypto heat into AI gold.

To meet the new demand, IREN has lined up a $5.8 billion hardware purchase from the Grey Box Shifter Dell, although the real winner here is Nvidia, whose chips are once again the golden ticket to corporate bragging rights.

Microsoft’s spending spree shows no sign of slowing. The company wants to double its data-centre footprint within two years and has already committed billions to GPU infrastructure across Europe and the US, including a €17.4 billion deal with Dutch outfit Nebius for new capacity in New Jersey and another with Nscale for 200,000 Nvidia processors.

All this AI gluttony has come at a price. The massive demand for GPUs and the sheer electricity needed to run them have turned data-centre construction into a national sport. Power grids are straining, and component shortages are keeping everyone twitchy.

Microsoft, though, seems happy to keep writing cheques until something blows up.