Blue Owl Capital announced on August 28, 2026 that funds it manages are leading a $2.4 billion compute equipment financing for IREN Limited, the vertically integrated AI Cloud platform, to fund purchases of NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra GPUs for IREN’s Mackenzie data center campus in British Columbia, Canada.
The financing comprises a $1.2 billion senior secured term loan and $1.2 billion of senior secured notes. Proceeds will fund IREN’s purchase of air-cooled NVIDIA Accelerated Computing Infrastructure, including Blackwell Ultra GPUs, for the Mackenzie campus. IREN operates as a vertically integrated AI Cloud platform delivering data centers, compute, and software for AI training and inference.
Tranche Structure Matches Hardware Delivery
The facility is structured to fund equipment purchases in tranches over a defined draw period, allowing capital to be deployed alongside the delivery and commissioning of hardware. Blue Owl said the transaction supports IREN’s continued build-out of AI Cloud infrastructure, which the company describes as underpinned by a more than 5GW global data center development pipeline.
In IREN’s fiscal 2026 results release, published on August 27, 2026, the company described the same facility as a financing led by Blue Owl and Pacific Investment Management Company LLC, acting as adviser to certain investors, at a 9.0% fixed rate for the Mackenzie air-cooled expansion. IREN stated that the facility funds 90% of the associated GPU capital expenditure and that, together with customer prepayments, it provides funding in excess of GPU capex and supports other data center capital requirements. IREN grouped the Blue Owl-led deal within a new $2.8 billion of GPU financings supporting non-investment grade customer deployments.
Anthony Lewis, IREN’s Chief Financial Officer, tied the financing to customer demand in Blue Owl’s announcement. “Customer demand for AI compute is accelerating, and we are scaling rapidly to meet it,” Lewis said, describing the financing as supporting the build-out of AI Cloud infrastructure at Mackenzie across AI training and inference workloads.
Equipment Finance Applied to GPU Fleets
NVIDIA also weighed in on the structure. Nico Caprez, Vice President of Global AI Infrastructure Growth at NVIDIA, said in the announcement that CUDA makes NVIDIA AI factories fungible across customers and workloads, and framed the Blue Owl facility as a proof point for asset-backed GPU financing as a repeatable model for financing AI infrastructure at scale.
Kurt Tenenbaum, Senior Managing Director at Blue Owl, positioned the deal as equipment finance discipline applied at AI scale. He cited Blue Owl’s investment track record and operating experience across more than 100 data centers worldwide as the basis for tailoring the facility to how AI infrastructure is actually delivered and deployed, and said the firm aims to serve as a partner to the AI compute ecosystem while targeting risk-adjusted returns for its investors.
Blue Owl describes itself as an alternative asset manager with $319 billion in assets under management as of June 30, 2026, investing across three multi-strategy platforms: Credit, Real Assets, and GP Strategic Capital. The firm reports employing more than 1,380 professionals globally.
IREN’s Broader Build-Out
The Mackenzie financing lands amid a wider infrastructure expansion documented in IREN’s own disclosures. In its fiscal 2026 results, covering the year ended June 30, 2026, IREN reported a development footprint spanning British Columbia sites including Mackenzie, Canal Flats, and Prince George, alongside development projects in Texas, Oklahoma, Australia, and Spain. The company said it delivered its first 50MW liquid-cooled deployment to Microsoft at Childress, Texas in August 2026, with further phases in commissioning and late-stage construction.
IREN reported $4 billion in contracted annualized run-rate revenue for 2026 capacity, with $1 billion of operating ARR as of August 26, 2026, 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% weighted average interest rate, which it said funds 96% of the associated GPU capex when combined with prepayments.
On the equipment side, IREN’s platform is built around land and grid-connected power in renewable-rich regions across North America, Europe, and APAC, per the company’s description. The Mackenzie deployment financed through the Blue Owl facility will use air-cooled infrastructure rather than the liquid-cooled configurations IREN is delivering at Childress.
Blue Owl said the facility’s draw structure is intended to align capital deployment with hardware delivery and commissioning schedules at the campus.
