Blue Owl leads $2.4 billion IREN GPU financing at 9%

Blue Owl leads $2.4 billion IREN GPU financing at 9%

William Foxley

Thu, September 3, 2026 at 5:07 PM GMT+3 2 min read

Blue Owl Capital (NYSE: OWL) led a $2.4 billion senior secured financing for IREN (NASDAQ: IREN), supporting NVIDIA GPU purchases for its Mackenzie campus in British Columbia, according to a Blue Owl Capital press release dated August 28.

The financing is divided between a senior secured term loan worth $1.2 billion and senior secured notes totaling $1.2 billion. Both portions carry a 9% interest rate and mature two and a half years after funding, Bloomberg reported, citing a filing. Pacific Investment Management also participated.

IREN will use the proceeds to buy air-cooled NVIDIA Accelerated Computing Infrastructure, including Blackwell Ultra GPUs. The financing will fund purchases in tranches during a defined draw period, matching debt deployment with hardware delivery and commissioning.

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Mackenzie adds to IREN's debt-funded buildout

Anthony Lewis, IREN's chief financial officer, said the financing would expand capacity for training and inference workloads as customer demand grows.

"Customer demand for AI compute is accelerating, and we are scaling rapidly to meet it," Lewis said. "This financing supports the continued build-out of our AI Cloud infrastructure at Mackenzie, expanding our capacity to serve a growing customer base across both AI training and inference workloads."

The 9% pricing exceeds the roughly 6% blended cost reported for IREN's separate $3.65 billion Microsoft-related financing. That earlier package included a $2.10 billion private placement priced at the equivalent of SOFR plus 213 bps and a $1.55 billion delayed-draw term loan at SOFR plus 225 bps, supported by interest-rate hedges.

The Microsoft financing supports a five-year managed-services contract at IREN's Childress campus in Texas, while Blue Owl's announcement did not identify a customer contract backing the Mackenzie debt.

IREN targets additional GPU financing

IREN has set out a $25 billion to $30 billion fiscal-2027 capital plan, covering GPU deployments and data-center construction extending into 2028. Management entered the fiscal year with about $14 billion provided by cash, GPU-financing commitments and customer prepayments, and was targeting another $8 billion through financing and prepayments.

IREN previously said customer prepayments had covered 45% to 55% of GPU capital expenditure on recent deployments. Financing for customer deployments that were not investment grade, including the Mackenzie package, funded about 90% of the relevant equipment cost.

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Blue Owl said IREN's platform is backed by more than 5GW of data-center development worldwide. IREN plans to expand its GPU fleet to 150,000 units by the end of 2026 under its broader infrastructure partnership with NVIDIA.