Overview
- Blue Owl announced Friday that funds it manages led a $2.4 billion compute equipment financing for IREN to buy air‑cooled NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra GPUs for the Mackenzie, British Columbia campus.
- The facility is split into a $1.2 billion senior secured term loan and $1.2 billion of senior secured notes with tranche‑based draws timed to hardware delivery and commissioning.
- Crypto Briefing reported the August tranche as non‑investment‑grade carrying a roughly 9% fixed rate, reflecting higher cost of capital when deals lack a named offtake anchor.
- The deal follows IREN’s June $3.65 billion investment‑grade GPU financing backed by a Microsoft offtake and rated A/A(low), together part of more than $6.5 billion in recent GPU financing tied to the company’s rapid pivot from bitcoin mining to AI cloud services.
- The financing reflects a broader shift where private credit treats high‑end GPUs as financeable collateral because NVIDIA‑driven hardware is fungible across customers, a trend that could speed data‑center buildouts but raise refinancing and depreciation risks for operators and local communities.