India, Nov. 4 -- Microsoft has entered in a five year, USD 9.7 billion contract with IREN, an Australian data centre operator to secure access to artificial intelligence (AI) cloud capacity.

This agreement grants Microsoft guaranteed access to Nvidia GB300 accelerator systems, which are designed for advanced Ai workloads. IREN will house this hardware in its expanding data centre complex in Childress, Texas.

The partnership with IREN offers Microsoft an important avenue to bypass the bottlenecks in AI computing. For over a year, Microsoft has heavily invested in its cloud infrastructure, spending billions in capital expenditures to keep up with the explosive demand for AI tools and services hosted on its Azure platform.

By utilizing an...