SA Torches IREN
It's sometimes good to step back and relish the difference between Nebius and their competitors. Watching Nebius execute at the level they are at, day after day, is exquisite.
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IREN continues to come up in our conversations with neocloud customers, and usually for the wrong reasons. In Prince George and Mackenzie in Northern BC, Canada, we’ve heard the stories: multi-day power outages, network upgrades, storage failures, air quality controls leading to link flaps, XIDs everywhere. The #1 worst site in the industry, according to users.
And we are some of their users, as we’ve gotten to test IREN GPUs from multiple providers that resell their capacity. A lot of our users we are hearing from who aren’t having a good time aren’t renting from IREN resellers, but from IREN themselves.
With that said, the new builds in Childress and Sweetwater look much better (read: not N+0 power, cooling, and ISPs!). We’ve covered plenty about these sites in our Datacenter Model; suffice it to say that despite all the technical shortcomings in their cloud services, we expect the $2.1B investment from NVIDIA will help them cut fewer corners this time around.
We recommend that IREN stop falsely claiming to offer managed clusters in public investment materials, such as in their most recent 10-K, where they claimed to "own and operate" all layers of the stack, including "managed cloud services."
Their CCO was correct when he recently said, "we don't have any live managed services today."
IREN should focus on their bare metal offerings, where there is plenty of market demand for their services.