US data center and cloud firm Iren is expanding into Australia.

The company this week announced the signing of a transmission connection agreement to support a planned 800MW data center campus in Bundey, South Australia.

The project is Iren’s first foray into Australia. Full details haven’t been shared, but the site should be energized in 2028.

Daniel Roberts, co-founder and co-CEO of Iren, said: “South Australia offers what AI infrastructure at scale requires: abundant clean energy, the connectivity to serve the APAC region, and a State Government that understands the opportunity and is acting on it. The Bundey campus is able to serve global and regional AI demand, as well as South Australia’s own growing need for AI compute.”

The company alluded to potential expansion to Australia earlier this year during its latest earnings results. CEO Roberts said at the time that opportunity there was “as significant as anywhere in our portfolio.”

Bundey, a locality in the Mid North region of South Australia, is some 160km northeast of Adelaide. Iren said the campus is around 125km/78 miles from Adelaide.

Peter Malinauskas, Premier of South Australia, said: “Iren’s proposed Bundey campus represents a significant investment in our state, with the potential to create hundreds of construction jobs, support long-term skilled roles, and strengthen South Australia’s position as a technology and innovation hub for the Asia-Pacific region.”

Formerly known as Iris Energy, the company is in the midst of a pivot away from cryptomining towards its AI cloud business. While it is still mining Bitcoin, the firm is winding down its mining operations and diverting cash flow to its AI business.

Iren is a cryptominer turned AI cloud provider with data centers located across Canada and the US. Currently, it has some 23,000 GPUs in its fleet, and in October said that contracts had been secured for around 11,000 of them.

The company has data center sites live and in development across Texas (Childress, Sweetwater), Oklahoma (Kiowa), and British Columbia in Canada (Mackenzie, Prince George, and Canal Flats). The firm says its pipeline has now reached 5GW.

The company recently acquired Spanish data center firm Nostrum. The deal, marking Iren’s entry into Europe, gives the company approximately 490MW of secured, grid-connected power in Spain.

Microsoft is a major customer, and Nvidia is set to invest up to $2.1 billion in the company to deploy up to 5GW of compute.

This month also saw Iren close a $3.65bn investment-grade GPU financing facility to support the delivery of its AI cloud contract with Microsoft.

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