Blue Owl Leads $2.4B GPU Financing for IREN

Blue Owl Capital Inc.-managed funds are leading a $2.4 billion equipment financing for IREN Ltd. to expand the AI cloud provider’s computing capacity at its Mackenzie data center campus in British Columbia, Canada.

The financing combines a $1.2 billion senior secured term loan with $1.2 billion of senior secured notes. IREN plans to use the proceeds to purchase air-cooled NVIDIA accelerated-computing infrastructure, including Blackwell Ultra graphics processing units, or GPUs, used in artificial-intelligence training and inference workloads.

The facility will fund equipment purchases in tranches over a defined draw period, matching debt funding with the delivery and commissioning of hardware. That structure can help an AI infrastructure provider avoid paying interest on the full commitment before equipment is operational and producing revenue.

IREN, which provides data centers, computing capacity and software for AI customers, said the transaction supports the ongoing development of its AI Cloud platform. The company has a global data center development pipeline exceeding five gigawatts.

“Customer demand for AI compute is accelerating, and we are scaling rapidly to meet it,” IREN chief financial officer Anthony Lewis said. The expansion is intended to serve customers using AI systems for both training and inference, or the operation of trained models.

Blue Owl said the investment draws on its digital infrastructure underwriting and operating experience across more than 100 data centers worldwide. Kurt Tenenbaum, a senior managing director at Blue Owl, said that experience enabled the firm to tailor the facility to the way AI infrastructure is deployed.

Blue Owl has backed other AI infrastructure projects, including Meta Platforms’ Hyperion facility in Louisiana and a project in Abilene, Texas, developed with Crusoe and Primary Digital Infrastructure. The firm manages $319 billion in assets across its Credit, Real Assets, and GP Strategic Capital platforms.