The deal, announced May 7 and closed today, gives the NASDAQ-listed company (ticker: IREN) its first European foothold. Financial terms were not disclosed. Nostrum was developing six data center campuses across Spain, targeting a combined 500 megawatts of sustainable IT capacity by 2027. The centerpiece of that portfolio is the Evergreen campus in Badajoz, in southwestern Spain's Extremadura region, where 300 megawatts of power is already secured and the site is designed to scale to between 500 megawatts and 1 gigawatt over time. Engineering firm AECOM is handling design and construction management on the project, a contract valued at roughly $2.1 billion (for the construction contract alone). The campus is also projected to prevent 10 million metric tonnes of CO₂ emissions over its operational life. It is expected to be ready to build by September 2026, with operations beginning in the fourth quarter of 2027.

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From Bitcoin Miner to AI Infrastructure Company

IREN, which rebranded from Iris Energy in November 2024, built its early reputation as a Bitcoin miner running entirely on renewable power across sites in Texas, British Columbia, Oklahoma, and Australia. The April 2024 Bitcoin halving cut block rewards in half, squeezing margins across the mining industry and accelerating what was already an emerging pivot toward AI and high-performance computing. IREN is now actively winding down its legacy mining hardware. In its most recent quarterly results (Q3 fiscal year 2026), the company recorded $140.4 million in non-cash impairments tied to retired mining equipment, and revenue fell 22 percent quarter-on-quarter to $144.8 million. Net loss widened to $247.8 million.

The financial pressure is partly by design. IREN is redirecting capital toward GPU clusters and data center campuses. Its contracted ARR has grown to $3.1 billion, with a target of $3.7 billion by year end. A significant share of that contracted base is anchored by a Microsoft relationship representing $1.9 billion in ARR. A five-year, $3.4 billion AI cloud contract with NVIDIA, announced the same day as the Nostrum deal, adds further scale. Under the agreement, IREN will provide managed GPU cloud services using NVIDIA's Blackwell-platform systems at its Childress, Texas campus. NVIDIA was also granted a five-year option to buy up to 30 million IREN shares at $70 each, representing a potential $2.1 billion investment.

In its Q3 results commentary, IREN stated: "The world is structurally short compute, and the bottleneck is delivered data center and GPU capacity."

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Why Spain

Spain has become one of Europe's more attractive markets for AI infrastructure investment, and not by accident. Renewables accounted for 56.8 percent of Spain's electricity generation in 2024, providing the clean power that large cloud customers increasingly require. The country is also positioned at a subsea cable crossroads linking Europe with Africa and Latin America, making its data centers strategically useful for latency-sensitive applications across those regions. Spain has also moved ahead of most EU peers on regulatory clarity: it is among the first member states to introduce data center-specific regulations, with a forthcoming Royal Decree expected to establish a stable permitting framework and competitive energy pricing relative to Northern European markets. Amazon has separately committed 33.7 billion euros to Spanish data center development, a signal that hyperscaler interest in the market is substantial.

Nostrum's Badajoz campus was designed with a power usage effectiveness ratio of 1.1, an industry-leading figure, and uses zero water cooling.

Daniel Roberts, co-CEO and co-founder of IREN, framed the acquisition as a long-term strategic bet. "This acquisition establishes a strategic platform in Europe for IREN," he said. "Nostrum adds high-quality sites, an experienced local team and a leading position in an attractive market for AI infrastructure."

Gabriel Nebreda, CEO of Nostrum Group and an industry veteran with more than 25 years of experience, pointed specifically to government demand as a growth driver. "With IREN's vision, expertise and global platform, we are well positioned to serve the growing needs of customers in Europe, including sovereign AI programs," he said.

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A Template With Broader Implications

That reference to sovereign AI is worth noting for readers outside Europe. Governments in India, Nigeria, Kenya, and South Africa are pursuing similar strategies: building or contracting domestically controlled AI compute capacity to reduce reliance on foreign hyperscaler infrastructure. India's IndiaAI Mission and Kenya's data sovereignty legislation are active examples of this policy direction. The model IREN is executing in Spain, pairing grid-connected renewable power with AI cloud services in a structure that governments can contract directly, maps closely onto what those countries say they want.

IREN's pivot is also part of a structural industry shift. Public Bitcoin miners have collectively signed more than $70 billion in AI and high-performance computing contracts, and AI and HPC are projected to account for approximately 70 percent of transformed miners' revenue by end-2026. The Spain acquisition is the latest move in that direction for IREN, but the underlying logic is playing out across the sector.

Africa's AI data center market was valued at $2.51 billion in 2026 and is projected to reach $8.24 billion by 2031, according to Mordor Intelligence. Nigeria alone is forecast to grow at 34 percent annually through 2031. IREN has made no announcements targeting African or South Asian markets, but its approach of using low-cost renewable power as the foundation for AI infrastructure is a model that operators in Ethiopia, Kenya, and Paraguay, where cheap hydropower already supports Bitcoin mining, will be watching.

IREN now holds a 5 gigawatt global power portfolio, targets 150,000 NVIDIA GPUs deployed by end of 2026, and has operations or development activity across North America, Europe, and Australia. The Badajoz campus, once operational, will be the centerpiece of its European presence. The European Commission is also preparing a data center energy efficiency package expected later this year, according to Data Center Knowledge, which could shape how new capacity is permitted and labeled across the bloc.