Iren: Company built by two Sydney brothers Dan and Will Roberts now worth more than ASX

Three years ago a computer company built by two Sydney brothers, Dan and Will Roberts, looked like it was going broke. On Friday morning shares in their datacentre business, Iren, hit a record high in the US, turning them into Australia’s newest billionaires.

Iren is worth around $19 billion, or more than Qantas Airways or the Australian Securities Exchange, which wasn’t interested in the Bitcoin miner when it tried to float in 2021.

Trading on the Nasdaq Stock Market instead, the stock has risen 678 per cent over the past six months, driven by demand for AI-specialist computer servers the brothers lease out to big technology companies.

Based on Thursday’s trading, the brothers are worth $1.06 billion each, placing 35-year-old Will among the richest ten Australians under 40. Daniel is 41. The brothers attended Sydney boys school Saint Ignatius’ College and studied business at University of Technology, Sydney.

Both men declined to comment on their new wealth. A professional investor who follows the stock, Shaun Weick at Wilson Asset Management, said they had perfectly timed a shift from Bitcoin mining to Artificial Intelligence.

“Some might say they’re lucky, some might say it’s skill,” he said. “It’s probably both, but they’ve been very clever pitching themselves with bitcoin and are now big beneficiaries of the AI story.”

Three years ago it was unclear the company would survive. The shares had fallen 96 per cent. The business was bleeding cash and fighting off creditors who claimed they were owed more than $US100 million ($150 million).

On December 28, 2022, the stock hit $US1.06. On Thursday it hit an intraday high of $US49.39.

Before starting their own investment business, the brothers worked at investment bank Macquarie in Sydney, gaining experience across the capital market advisory, infrastructure, and renewable energy investment sectors, which their bitcoin and AI business now straddles.

Daniel is a self-confessed bitcoin apostle. He regularly predicts the digital token’s price will hit a $US1 million by 2030. He’s also a keen skier, golfer, and AFL fan, who spends his time between the company’s data centre sites in Texas in the US and homes in Sydney, with a farmstead in regional New South Wales.

He regularly flies between Sydney and Houston on Qantas, and doesn’t mind reminding Australians that he was rejected in his home town.

“After the brown cardigans at the ASX rejected us due to their anti-technology stance, IREN - now ASX100 scale - was forced to list overseas. I know others haven’t even bothered trying locally as a result,” he wrote on LinkedIn a few months ago.

In response the ASX said it doesn’t comment on individual companies, but has supported around 190 prior tech-specific floats and 11 are worth more than $10 billion.

“We consider a range of factors when evaluating an entity’s suitability for listing, including the organisational structure and the nature of its business operations,” a spokesperson said.

Iren’s ASX listing likely failed because it was a bitcoin miner, which was an alien quantity to regulators in 2021. The company was known as Iris Energy before changing its name in 2024.

Rollercoaster ride

In November 2021, the brothers tied their company to bitcoin’s fortunes by listing it on the Nasdaq at the peak of a pandemic-era tech stock and crypto bubble linked to ultra-low interest rates and government money printing.

The fastest interest rate hikes in a generation sent the business down 96 per cent into a near death spiral in 2022, before it recovered in line with rising bitcoin prices and a investor mania for companies linked to AI.

Early investors included billionaire Atlassian co-founder and climate change activist Mike Cannon-Brookes via his Grok family office. Grok was attracted to Iris Energy’s initial business plan as a renewable energy powered data centre operator in Canada where hydro power is abundant.

The brothers shifted from a clean energy data centre dream to zero-emission bitcoin mining in 2020 and shifted to leasing servers to AI operators in 2023.

“They’ve just done a great job in pivoting the company,” said Wilson’s Mr Weick. “Bitcoin mining was first pitched as the key focus [to investors] and the [renewable energy] cost of compute would be their edge to generate profits and that’s another factor as we now move into AI.

“They’ve also been appointed as an Nvidia preferred partner and that places them in a good position to access chips and build out capacity.”

Critics emerge

Their jaw-dropping success has drawn controversy. Creditors in the US sued them in Australian courts, claiming Iren owed $US107.3 million for bitcoin computers. The company got hit by a US short seller report last July. Culper Research labelled Iren “a painfully transparent stock promotion”.

It called Iren’s claims that it could pivot into high performance computing (HPC) “nonsense” and pointed out the company had spent $US716 million since its inception.

Iren has previously declined to answer questions about how a halving of the reward for mining bitcoins in April, 2024, affected its business. The short seller claimed the business would be “decimated” as it meant the same amount of computing power cost was needed for half the amount of bitcoin to be mined as a reward.

Iren’s latest accounts show it earnt $US486.4 million from bitcoin mining last year at a cost in electricity of $US157.7 million. Net profit reached $US86.9 million.

Share traders have largely dismissed the short seller’s claims and decided the Australian-led business is a potentially big AI beneficiary.

Professional investors are largely on board too. On August 29, analysts at the brothers’ former employer, Macquarie Group, suggested their professional experience and expertise in conventional energy and infrastructure development gave them an edge. It noted they could use their experience to raise money to buy instal more servers with Nvidia computer chips for data centres that tech companies need to train their AI models on.

The company has borrowed close to $US1 billon to fund expansion. Big investors include Blackrock, Fidelity and Citadel.

Macquarie’s analysts say Iren is at risk from a fall in the bitcoin price. Both brothers are steadily cashing out of a business still largely tied to the fortunes of bitcoin. On September 11, they sold 1 million shares each for around $US66.4 million ($98 million) between them.

In total both retain 13.99 million shares individually, worth $1.06 billion based on Thursday’s share price.