It's not just Terawulf, IREN shares are soaring because of Anthropic too

All eyes are on Terawulf (WULF) shares this morning after the digital infrastructure firm revealed a monumental $19 billion contracted revenue deal with Anthropic.

But it’s not all about WULF only; neocloud provider IREN Ltd (IREN) is soaring this morning as well, and it also has the same artificial intelligence (AI) research lab to thank.

Despite today’s gains, however, IREN shares are hovering just over the price at which they started 2026.

Here’s why IREN stock is soaring on Monday

The primary catalyst fueling IREN stock at writing is the revelation that the company has been shortlisted for Anthropic’s massive, confidential data center procurement project in Australia.

According to reports from The Australian Financial Review’s Street Talk column, the high-profile AI lab behind the Claude family of LLMs wants to secure a whopping 1.4 gigawatts of operational capacity in a regional expansion valued between $12 billion and $15 billion.

Being named an elite bidder alongside institutional real estate giants like AirTrunk and NextDC heavily validates IREN’s rapid pivot into high-performance computing (HPC).

This validation is further amplified today by a broader tech sector rebound – with Nasdaq futures gaining over 1.1% to lift high-beta AI growth names across the board.

IREN shares to benefit from enterprise contracts

The structural implications of Anthropic’s multi-billion-dollar tender transform IREN’s long-term commercial outlook as it positions the company to lock in highly lucrative, multi-decade enterprise hosting contracts.

It also sharpens investor focus on IREN’s balance‑sheet discipline and its ability to scale without diluting shareholders.

A bid of this magnitude signals that IREN’s modular HPC architecture, renewable‑heavy power strategy, and accelerated commissioning timelines meet the technical and operational thresholds demanded by frontier‑model developers.

Just being in the final cohort improves IREN shares’ credibility with hyperscalers, strengthens its negotiating leverage for future enterprise contracts, and broadens the probability for long‑duration, inflation‑protected revenue streams that could reshape its valuation trajectory.

How Wall Street recommends playing IREN Ltd

As regular trading progresses, the dual announcements from TeraWulf and IREN clearly signal that frontier AI enterprises are looking past traditional hyperscalers to secure raw, grid-allocated power.

Anthropic’s multi-billion-dollar infrastructure commitments prove that AI capital expenditures are being distributed across multiple agile infrastructure providers rather than a single winner-take-all monopoly.

For IREN stock, transitioning its massive 5-gigawatt secured power pipeline into multi-decade enterprise hosting leases completely reshapes its forward-looking revenue predictability heading into the upcoming August earnings cycle.

While execution risks regarding capital dilution remain a standard talking point on Wall Street, the mid-summer market price action demonstrates that institutional investors are aggressively buying the dip on verified megawatt ownership.

Note that Wall Street currently has a “Moderate Buy” rating on IREN Ltd, with a mean price target of nearly $81.