Do you know why I am looking at $NBIS instead of IREN?
I do not blindly support a stock just because it has big projects on paper or keeps announcing expansion plans. As an independent investor, I focus on where pricing power sits in the value chain, how much the actual assets earn, and how far a company can monetize them.
$IREN bulls seem to believe that moving from Bitcoin mining to AI data centers and acquiring more land will make them the king of this industry. But when I compare IREN with NBIS, I see a huge difference between building physical data centers and actually running and optimizing high-end computing software.
IREN has reported $4 billion in contracted annualized revenue run rate, but its actual operating revenue run rate is still around $1 billion. Nebius, on the other hand, has already reached $3 billion in annualized cloud revenue run rate, with a full-year target of $7B to $9B ARR. Nebius already has active computing capacity generating revenue, while IREN is still dealing with the timeline risks of getting its infrastructure operational.
IREN's background is mainly in developing industrial sites, building data center shells and securing power connections. To me, it looks more like a specialized infrastructure landlord that still relies on Dell and NVIDIA for advanced IT designs. Nebius is different. It is a full-stack AI cloud company. From low-level bare-metal management to its own cluster software, model training platforms and AI applications, Nebius runs the technology itself. One company provides the physical infrastructure, while the other operates the actual computing systems.
Nebius also designs and owns its own greenfield data centers, giving it around 20% lower total cost of ownership compared with the market average. That gives the company more flexibility when pricing its services for enterprise customers. Its Q2 AI cloud adjusted EBITDA margin has already reached 49.7%, while IREN is still dealing with legacy impairments and the heavy capital costs of transforming its business.
IREN is still focused on securing wholesale customers and hosting agreements, including its Microsoft deal. Nebius already has over $40 billion in customer commitments, including four major deals in the billion-dollar range. Its business is directly connected to large global developers and enterprise customers rather than depending entirely on wholesale hosting partners.
IREN could still be a strong and relatively safer investment for people who want exposure to power-secured land, large data center campuses and long-term physical assets. But when it comes to the actual AI computing layer, large-scale active deployments and high-margin cloud operations, I believe Nebius is playing at a completely different level. IREN is bringing power to the buildings, while Nebius is running the actual computing business inside them.
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