Why Investors Should Buy IREN Limited Over Nebius

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Quick Read

  • IREN trades down 6% year to date while NBIS surged 150%, creating a contrarian entry if Roberts delivers Horizons 2-4 on schedule.

  • Customer prepayments funded 96% of IREN's Microsoft GPU capex, a capital-efficiency signal masking a $684M GAAP loss tied to scrapped mining hardware.

  • Nebius landed four contracts averaging over $1 billion each and holds $37 billion in obligations, but three customers generate 59% of its revenue.

  • Act now: the analyst who called NVIDIA in 2010 just named his top 10 AI stocks — and Nebius Group didn't make the cut. Grab the names FREE today.

IREN Limited (NASDAQ:IREN) and Nebius Group (NASDAQ:NBIS) just reported earnings that read like two chapters of the same AI buildout. IREN is closing a Bitcoin-to-AI pivot. Nebius is stacking billion-dollar contracts on a full-stack cloud. One quarter looked painful. The other looked pristine.

A stylized 3D rendered cloud icon, predominantly dark blue with bright cyan highlights and internal circuit board patterns, sits on a reflective dark surface. In the background, a glowing white network of interconnected dots forms a wavy, abstract landscape against a gradient dark blue to purple backdrop, representing digital data and connectivity.
Andriy Onufriyenko / Moment via Getty Images

Impairments Bury IREN. Landmark Deals Lift Nebius.

IREN's June-quarter revenue landed at $137.2 million, missing the $140.75 million consensus by 2.52%, with a $684 million GAAP net loss driven by a $450.4 million non-cash impairment on decommissioned mining hardware. AI Cloud revenue hit $70.5 million and more than doubled sequentially. CEO Daniel Roberts said "the digital world can scale almost instantly, but the physical world cannot." Horizon 1 shipped to Microsoft with NVIDIA Exemplar Cloud status on GB300 NVL72.

Nebius moved opposite. Q2 revenue jumped 454.04% year over year to $582.30 million, beating consensus by 1.33%. The AI Cloud unit produced $285.7 million of adjusted EBITDA at a 50% margin. Four landmark contracts closed, averaging more than a billion dollars each. Remaining performance obligations stand at $37.49 billion.

Business Driver

IREN

Nebius

Latest Revenue

$137.2M (miss)

$582.3M (beat)

Contracted ARR Target

$4B by Dec 2026

$7B to $9B by end 2026

Anchor Customer

Microsoft (Horizon)

Meta, Microsoft, Cohere

Act now: the analyst who called NVIDIA in 2010 just named his top 10 AI stocks — and Nebius Group didn't make the cut. Grab the names FREE today.

NBIS price target
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Vertically Integrated Underdog Meets Full-Stack Machine

IREN owns power, land, substations, cooling and buildings across Texas, British Columbia, Oklahoma, Australia and Spain, with more than five gigawatts of announced capacity. Roberts wants each layer to earn a margin. Recent three-year contracts price at more than $20 million per megawatt of IT load, with active discussions near $25 million. Customer prepayments funded roughly 96% of the Microsoft GPU capex, a striking capital-efficiency signal for a former miner (the power, cooling, and land layer IREN owns is exactly the non-chip AI supply chain we mapped in a free report on seven AI infrastructure names).