Bitcoin Miner Iris Energy Inks AI Cloud Services Deal With Poolside AI

The bitcoin mining corporation Iris Energy, listed on the Nasdaq, has declared its entry into a cloud services partnership with the artificial intelligence (AI) startup Poolside AI. The collaboration with Poolside comes after Iris acquired 248 Nvidia H100 graphics processing units (GPUs) for $10 million in August 2023.

Iris Energy Partners With Poolside AI

On Thursday, Iris Energy, trading on Nasdaq under the ticker IREN, disclosed the initiation of a cloud service agreement with the AI startup Poolside AI. Established by Jason Warner, Github’s former chief technology officer, and Eiso Kant, a serial entrepreneur, Poolside is on a mission to develop a tool similar to Chatgpt, aimed at authoring software code. To this point, the startup has successfully secured $126 million in funding.

The two entities have formalized an agreement to kick off this cloud service collaboration for an initial period of three months, with an opportunity for extension. Iris unveiled on Thursday that its cloud service was initiated on Feb. 5, 2024, following the successful meeting of Poolside’s stringent testing criteria for Iris’s cloud technology infrastructure. Previously, in August, Iris announced the acquisition of 248 Nvidia H100 GPUs, investing $10 million.

Iris isn’t the sole bitcoin (BTC) mining player branching out into services for AI enterprises. Tether and Northern Data are also channeling investments into Nvidia GPUs for similar ventures, and Hive Digital of Canada has ventured into the AI domain too. Bitdeer, another publicly traded bitcoin mining firm, has joined the fray, securing Nvidia GPUs to offer computational services in the rapidly growing AI field. Daniel Roberts, co-CEO and co-founder of Iris Energy, expressed the company’s anticipation for expanding its cloud services division.

“We are pleased to partner with a company the [caliber] of Poolside. We look forward to further growing our GPU cloud services business and servicing the growing market demand we are seeing for these services,” Roberts said in a statement. On Thursday, IREN’s stock rose by 13%, yet it has seen a 25% decrease against the U.S. dollar over the last 30 days. Further analysis reveals that year-to-date, IREN’s shares have experienced a decline exceeding 41%.

What do you think about Iris Energy expanding into AI cloud services? Share your thoughts and opinions about this subject in the comments section below.