IREN said its older Nvidia H100 graphics processors were leased again at double their original contract price, and that the higher price is locked in for a multiyear term. Co-CEO Daniel Roberts said on the company’s November 5 earnings call: “older generation H100s, we just recontracted at double the original contract price.” (call transcript)
IREN’s annual report says it depreciates HPC hardware over five years (Form 10-K). Its latest quarterly report shows GPU hardware at cost of $5.819 billion on September 30, up from $2.035 billion on June 30 (Form 10-Q).
Business Pill · Capex and Depreciation
A FourWeekMBA Business Pill, “Capex and Depreciation Explained: Why Chip Lifetime Drives AI Profits.” It does not discuss IREN or the H100 contracts in this piece.
The key insight: IREN said older H100s were re-leased at double their original contract price, locked in for a multiyear term, while its 10-K depreciates HPC hardware over five years.
In prepared remarks, Roberts said that since the quarter ended IREN had “expanded our AI cloud contract further with the same leading AI frontier lab and contracted H100s at double the original pricing.” He did not name the lab.
Asked by an analyst about contract durations, Chief Commercial Officer Kent Draper said: “the reference that Dan gave on the H100s to doubling the price that they were previously being leased out, that is now for a multiyear term that, that additional pricing has been locked in for.” He added: “it’s not that we were able to double capacity by selling on an ultra short-term contract.”
Roberts also said IREN had signed a five-year contract at $22 million of annualized revenue per megawatt of IT load, with a customer prepayment covering about 90% of the GPU capital spending, and a shorter contract above $40 million per megawatt. We compared those deal prices with other AI cloud providers (our piece).
Selected property, plant and equipment at cost from IREN’s Form 10-Q for the quarter ended September 30, 2026. The 2.9x ratio is our arithmetic. IREN’s 10-K depreciates HPC hardware over five years.
How IREN Depreciates Its GPUs
The 10-K for the year to June 30, 2026 lists useful lives of 20 years for buildings, four years for mining hardware and five years for HPC hardware. For GPUs pledged as collateral under its GPU financing facility, it says “Depreciation on these assets is recorded on a straight-line basis over an estimated useful life of 5 years.”
The 10-Q describes the risk the H100 pricing bears on: “Compute hardware is subject to rapid technological change, and the introduction of new architectures may reduce the market rate for earlier generations.” It says IREN manages that exposure by “maintaining a multi-generation fleet” and by seeking contract terms and durations that support recovery of the associated capital cost.
What Is on the Balance Sheet
The 10-Q shows GPU hardware at cost of $5.819 billion on September 30, 2026, against $2.035 billion on June 30. Mining hardware fell to $226 million from $597 million, and construction in progress rose to $4.608 billion from $3.657 billion.
Depreciation and amortization was $148 million in the quarter, against $85 million a year earlier. GPUs and related infrastructure with a net carrying amount of $4.769 billion were pledged as security, the filing says. Lenders have been lending against GPUs at a record pace this year (our piece).
Our Numbers
By our arithmetic, a five-year straight-line life writes off 20% of a GPU’s cost each year, with no residual value assumed. IREN’s GPU hardware at cost rose about 2.9 times in one quarter ($5.819 billion over $2.035 billion), and quarterly depreciation and amortization rose about 74% from a year earlier.
IREN gave no dollar price for the H100 contracts, so we cannot compute a price per GPU-hour. The doubling it described is relative to the original contract price, not to a market index.
The Structural Read
As we read the call, the doubling is relative to IREN’s own earlier contracts: neither Roberts nor Draper gave a dollar price, a GPU count or a site.
As we read the filings, the H100 remarks matter because of scale: GPU hardware at cost was $5.819 billion on September 30, about 2.9 times the June figure by our arithmetic.
As we read the 10-Q, IREN itself names the opposite risk: it says new architectures may reduce the market rate for earlier generations.
Kent Draper, IREN Chief Commercial Officer, on the Nov 5, 2026 call
“This is genuine long-term contracting for those H100s that has still resulted in a doubling in price.”
Three Implications
FOR IREN Roberts said the H100s were contracted at double the original pricing, and Draper said the pricing is locked in for a multiyear term.
FOR LENDERS The 10-Q says GPUs and related infrastructure with a net carrying amount of $4.769 billion were pledged as collateral under IREN’s financing facilities.
FOR ACCOUNTING IREN’s 10-K lists a five-year useful life for HPC hardware and says it reviews useful lives at each reporting date.
The analysis says: “Inference is a revenue engine: continuous, distributed across millions of applications and agents, incurring marginal cost with every query.”
As we read it, IREN’s remarks are one company’s data point on what older hardware earns when compute stays in demand. The analysis does not discuss IREN or H100 re-leasing.
What Is Not Established
IREN did not say how many H100s were re-leased, at which site, what the original or new prices were, or how long the new term runs beyond being multiyear. The call transcript is a third-party transcription by The Motley Fool, not an official IREN document.
A SemiAnalysis podcast in October described labs renewing H100 contracts at about double their earlier rates (our piece). IREN’s remarks are a company disclosure of the same pattern for its own fleet; they do not show the price across the market. CoreWeave reports on November 10 (our piece on its debt and backlog).
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IREN said older H100s were re-leased at double their original contract price, locked in for a multiyear term. Its 10-K depreciates that hardware over five years, and its 10-Q shows GPU hardware at cost of $5.819 billion, about 2.9 times the June figure by our arithmetic.
A note on sourcing. Executive remarks are from The Motley Fool’s transcript of IREN’s November 5, 2026 earnings call. Balance-sheet and depreciation figures are from IREN’s Form 10-Q for the quarter ended September 30, 2026 and its Form 10-K for the year ended June 30, 2026. Ratios are our arithmetic. This piece is not investment advice.
Gennaro Cuofano is a CRO and tech executive who has worked in AI since late 2015, starting with bringing NLP, natural-language generation, voice and chatbot products to the marketing industry. His background is in law and finance: he holds a Master's degree in Law and an International MBA with an emphasis on corporate finance (LUISS Business School and the University of San Diego, 2012), and worked as a financial analyst at a real-estate investment firm in San Diego and as an assistant controller. His work focuses on business model strategy, business engineering and, more broadly, structural analysis: how companies make money, read from their own filings. He created FourWeekMBA and leads research there and at The Business Engineer, his newsletter on AI and business strategy, with over 95,000 subscribers and more than 1,000 published analyses. His writing has also appeared on Entrepreneur (for example, How to Digitize a Family Business in Europe) and HackerNoon. Find him on LinkedIn and Substack. See how we source.
