IREN Acquires Mirantis for $625 Million in All-Stock Deal, Adding Kubernetes and OpenStack Software to Its AI Cloud Stack
Former bitcoin miner IREN will pay $625 million in shares for Mirantis, the long-standing OpenStack and Kubernetes vendor behind the k0rdent platform, layering enterprise infrastructure software on top of its 2 GW Sweetwater AI campus.
Overview
IREN Limited announced on May 5, 2026 that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Mirantis, the cloud infrastructure software company best known for commercializing OpenStack and, more recently, the Kubernetes-based k0rdent AI platform. The transaction is structured as an all-stock deal valued at approximately $625 million in IREN ordinary shares at signing, according to IREN’s announcement on GlobeNewswire. Mirantis will operate as a standalone subsidiary, and the closing remains subject to customary conditions, including regulatory approvals.
The deal adds an enterprise software and services layer on top of an infrastructure business that, until two years ago, was a pure-play bitcoin miner. SiliconANGLE reports that IREN launched in 2018 as Australian bitcoin mining startup Iris Energy and rebranded in early 2024 to focus on AI infrastructure, eventually winning a $9.7 billion Microsoft contract in November 2024 for 200 megawatts of AI computing capacity.
What We Know
- The transaction value of approximately $625 million will be paid entirely in IREN ordinary shares, per the IREN announcement. Mirantis previously raised approximately $220 million in funding from Intel Corp., Goldman Sachs, and other investors, according to SiliconANGLE.
- Mirantis serves more than 1,500 enterprise customers globally and is a founding Independent Software Vendor partner of the NVIDIA AI Cloud Ready Initiative, the press release states.
- The k0rdent AI platform manages AI infrastructure across bare metal, virtual machines, and Kubernetes environments, per the press release. SiliconANGLE details the platform’s components, including a Services Controller that extends Kubernetes clusters with external tools, a CAPI component that enables operation on popular public clouds, configuration templating, GPU virtualization, and an inference autoscaling feature for AI applications.
- IREN’s flagship Sweetwater, Texas campus spans 1,800 acres with access to 2 gigawatts of electricity and is capable of hosting 700,000 liquid-cooled Nvidia graphics cards, SiliconANGLE reports. The first phase, Sweetwater 1, was energized this week, per Yahoo Finance, providing grid-connected capacity for AI and cloud workloads in parallel with the Mirantis deal.
Executive framing
IREN positions the acquisition as a way to layer software on top of its hardware buildout. “IREN’s core advantage is execution — from securing power to building data centers, deploying GPUs and bringing compute online at scale. Mirantis builds on our existing capabilities and strengthens how that compute is deployed, managed and operated for customers,” Daniel Roberts, IREN’s Co-Founder and Co-CEO, said in the announcement.
Mirantis CEO Alex Freedland framed the deal as a continuation of the company’s enterprise focus. “Mirantis has spent more than a decade helping enterprises deploy and manage cloud infrastructure. AI is creating a new set of customer requirements, and customers need platforms that are open, flexible and built for scale,” he said in the same announcement, adding that the combination will let the two firms “bring AI infrastructure online faster, while continuing to support existing customers and advance the k0rdent AI platform.”
Open-source commitments
The acquisition raises immediate questions for the OpenStack and Kubernetes communities about the future of projects Mirantis has long contributed to. Shaun O’Meara, CTO of Mirantis, addressed those concerns directly in remarks reported by SiliconANGLE: “Our contributions to k0rdent, Kubernetes, k0s, OpenStack and more continue,” he said, adding that “k0rdent remains open source.”
What We Don’t Know
- Neither IREN nor Mirantis has disclosed an expected closing date. The press release states only that closing is subject to customary conditions and regulatory approvals.
- The companies have not specified how Mirantis’s existing customer contracts, employee headcount, or office locations will be integrated.
- Whether Mirantis’s k0rdent platform will be offered exclusively on IREN-operated GPU infrastructure or remain available to other AI cloud and data center operators is not addressed in the announcement.
Analysis
The acquisition fits a broader pattern of vertical integration in the AI infrastructure stack. IREN, like several other operators that grew out of cryptocurrency mining, possesses long-lead-time advantages — secured power, land, and substation interconnects — that newer AI-native competitors cannot easily replicate. What such operators have generally lacked is the enterprise-grade orchestration, monitoring, and support layer that customers running production AI workloads expect from incumbent hyperscalers.
Mirantis fills exactly that gap. SiliconANGLE notes that the company shifted from commercializing OpenStack to developing k0rdent, a Kubernetes-based control plane for hybrid AI infrastructure. By bringing those capabilities in-house, IREN can market not just GPU capacity by the hour but a managed AI cloud product. The contemporaneous activation of Sweetwater 1 — IREN’s first liquid-cooled, grid-connected AI campus phase, per Yahoo Finance — gives the combined company physical capacity to back the new software layer.
For the open-source community, the signal that matters is continuity of upstream work. Mirantis has been a long-time contributor to OpenStack and the Kubernetes Cluster API ecosystem; a change in corporate ownership that pulled engineers out of those communities would have measurable effects on release velocity. The CTO’s public commitment that contributions “continue” and that k0rdent “remains open source” is the assurance those communities will be watching for evidence of in the months after the deal closes.