$IREN - Levels of Scarcity and Moving up the Value Chain
This Jim bro keeps talking about scarcity of power. Why does Jim bro not own any
$CIFR,
$BITF,
$SLNH,
$CAN? Does he not lift?
To preface, I think CIFR will convert on the rest of its power portfolio and much like how WULF’s second colocation deal was better than the first, CIFR a great chance of doing well. Other people who I have high respect for have good views on BITF. I don’t have any novel perspective on SLNH. Meanwhile, CAN has chicken legs. To explain why I own none of these though, I need to go through two concepts: levels of scarcity and moving up the value chain.
Levels of Scarcity
Consider water, iron ore, oil, gold, bitcoin. The scarcity of power in the coming years (2025-2030) is in between oil and gold. Oil doesn’t have shortages due to better planning and the shale revolution, so power is more scarce. Gold has major store of value while power doesn’t. CIFR ran up to $18 in pre-trading but is currently pulling back to $11.70. Some factors include 1) akin WULF’s first deal CIFR’s first deal was underwhelming 2) convertible. However, CIFR business models centers around a big contract, it’s only natural that CIFR runs up from $6.65 to $15 on the rumor and then dumps from $18 to $11.70 on the news. When zooming out, CIFR’s first deal took it from $6.65 to $11.70 - not bad at all.
@tempocap2 saw this from his TA quoted below, and it makes sense from a FA perspective too - this is a good example of buy the rumor, sell the news. Now,
$CIFR will have more deals as it only signed away 160MW on its 1GW (900MW EOY 2025, 100MW in 2026) capacity and 2GW 2027 pipeline (1). I respect Tyler Page (CIFR CEO) as an accomplished lawyer so he likely only states pipeline which has higher probability in. It’s important that CIFR limits its pipeline to count for power development up to 2027 while other companies include 2028, 2029 pipeline which is alot more uncertain. IREN on the other hand has moved up the value chain so it’s stock has taken less collateral damage from CIFR’s pullback compared BITF/SLNH/CAN, at the time of the writing IREN bouncing between green and red while the others are bleeding 10%-20%.
Moving up the Value Chain
By moving the value chain to IaaS, IREN creates a continuous and more smooth business model where profits and asset leverage helps it buy more GPUs for it’s IaaS business. This is why IREN has not crushed 10%-20%. In fact if you look at the inflection points, IREN trades with similar inflection points in the charts as CRWV, NBIS but higher positive magnitude (at time of writing,
$IREN is up 340% YTD,
$NBIS 283%,
$CRWV 215%). One possible explanation for this is that institutions have put IREN, NBIS, CRWV in a Necloud basket separate from CIFR, BITF, SLNH, GXLY which trade with its similar own inflection points. Now the first order value of IaaS is that there is alot of value in guaranteeing 99.8% uptime or whatever the SLA stipulates.
The second order effect is negotiation power. IREN can do IaaS for Platforming. In the future, I’m going to do more research to compare TogetherAI to Nebius Cloud but TogetherAI is a very promising partner for IREN to do IaaS for platforming. IREN will be responsible for Hardware and Real Networking/Base Layer Software (firmware versions, drivers etc) uptime while TogetherAI is responsible for Higher Level Software and Virtualized Networking uptime. For TogetherAI who has no datacenter or hardware uptime capabilities, IREN delivers unreplaceable value. That value allows IREN to negotiate a much better slice of the pie. Having a larger slice of the pie is extremely valuable as the complete pie (Power, DC, IaaS, PaaS, SaaS) plus customer relationships is what makes Azure, GCP, AWS trillions in market cap.
In the case of CIFR’s deal, CIFR’s slice of the pie is power (and construction?); Fluidstack likely owns the DC design IaaS; Google has the PaaS/SaaS. Although Google can do Power to SaaS, it’s out of powered DCs so it’s working with CIFR and Fluidstack. Very likely Google is also out of DC operations teams as Google is always training them at max to fill out its own DCs. IREN has 2 more slices of the pie because it owns Power, DC, IaaS. Not only is this lucrative in terms of margin, but also gives it much more leverage in terms of choosing partners.
Nebius for it’s Finland DC owns Power, DC, IaaS, PaaS, SaaS and in Vineland NJ DataOne (BSO division) owns power and construction, while Nebius owns the rest of the stack. I am very interested in the terms of both the DataOne and Microsoft deals but Nebius doesn’t release them for some reason. From what we know, Vineland NJ DC depends on behind the meter gas turbines and has higher capex and operation cost than west Texas mostly renewables. BSO is a much more established player than CIFR and is probably getting much better chunk of the pie than even WULF’s second deal. Before you laugh at BSO, BSO is actually the big dog in the room. BSO is private and has no public financials but is likely larger than NBIS, IREN, TogetherAI combined as BSO has 240 datacenters world wide (2); EQIX has ~270 datacenters and is worth 75B.
I am interested in NBIS's future pipelines but as of now, whatever NBIS margins are in PaaS/SaaS, IREN more than makes up for in 10x in power. Unless NBIS can get 5-6GW of power, it cannot become a hyperscaler whereas IREN can pair with the best platform whether it be TogetherAI, Databricks, or even NBIS to split the value of a 5-6GW hyper scaled Cloud by 2030.