New Delhi, Nov. 4 -- Microsoft has signed a monumental five-year, $9.7 billion deal with Australian data center operator IREN to secure much-needed compute power for its Azure AI services. The agreement marks a significant shift in IREN's business focus as it moves from bitcoin mining to providing infrastructure for AI workloads, capitalising on the increasing demand for AI cloud capacity.

For Microsoft, the partnership with IREN represents a strategic manoeuvre to bypass the existing compute bottleneck that many AI companies are facing. The demand for powerful GPUs to handle complex workloads, like AI reasoning models and generative systems, has surged globally, pushing hardware providers to capacity limits.

Instead of building new dat...