Blue Owl leads $2.4 billion GPU financing for IREN's AI factory

Asset-backed GPU financing is emerging as a repeatable model for AI infrastructure, with Blue Owl Capital leading a $2.4 billion facility to fund NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra purchases for IREN's Mackenzie data center in British Columbia.

"Customer demand for AI compute is accelerating, and we are scaling rapidly to meet it," Anthony Lewis, chief financial officer at IREN, said. The financing supports the build-out of AI Cloud infrastructure at Mackenzie across both AI training and inference workloads, he said.

The facility splits into a $1.2 billion senior secured term loan and $1.2 billion of senior secured notes, drawn in tranches alongside hardware delivery and commissioning. IREN's fiscal 2026 results, published Aug. 27, describe the deal as a 9.0 percent fixed-rate facility funding 90 percent of the associated GPU capital expenditure, part of $2.8 billion in new GPU financings supporting non-investment-grade customer deployments.

The deal shows how lenders are treating AI compute as an investable asset class. NVIDIA's Nico Caprez, vice president of global AI infrastructure growth, said CUDA makes NVIDIA AI factories fungible across customers and workloads, framing the facility as "another great proof point" for asset-backed GPU financing at scale. Blue Owl, with $319 billion in assets under management as of June 30, brings operating experience across more than 100 data centers to tailor the structure to how AI hardware is delivered and deployed, said Kurt Tenenbaum, senior managing director at Blue Owl.

Financing structure mirrors hardware delivery

The tranche structure aligns capital deployment with GPU delivery and commissioning schedules at the Mackenzie campus, which uses air-cooled infrastructure rather than the liquid-cooled configurations IREN is delivering elsewhere. IREN's platform is underpinned by a more than 5GW global data center development pipeline spanning British Columbia sites including Mackenzie, Canal Flats, and Prince George, alongside projects in Texas, Oklahoma, Australia, and Spain.

The Blue Owl-led deal sits within a broader financing push. IREN reported $4 billion in contracted annualized run-rate revenue for 2026 capacity, with $1 billion of operating ARR as of Aug. 26, and said its 2026 capacity is largely sold out. The company also disclosed a $3.6 billion investment-grade GPU financing tied to its Microsoft contract at a 6.0 percent weighted average interest rate, which funds 96 percent of the associated GPU capex when combined with prepayments. IREN delivered its first 50MW liquid-cooled deployment to Microsoft at Childress, Texas, in August.

Investor implications

The financing shows growing institutional appetite for GPU-backed debt as hyperscalers and AI cloud providers race to secure compute. For IREN, the facility funds 90 percent of GPU capex at Mackenzie, easing balance-sheet strain while it scales to meet contracted demand. For Blue Owl, the deal extends its digital infrastructure credit franchise into a new asset class, with the firm's $319 billion AUM providing the scale to underwrite multi-billion-dollar facilities. NVIDIA stands to benefit from the financing model as it removes a key friction point for customers buying its accelerators.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.