Blue Owl (OWL.US) teamed up with PIMCO to tailor $2.4 billion GPU financing for IREN (IREN.US)

Zhitong Finance App learned that a $2.4 billion debt financing led by a fund under Blue Owl Capital Inc. (OWL.US) has been secured, and the funds will go to cloud computing service provider IREN Ltd. (IREN.US) to purchase Nvidia (NVDA.US) Blackwell Ultra GPUs to support the construction of a data center park in Canada.

The financing includes a $1.2 billion preferential guaranteed term loan and the same amount of senior guarantee notes. The structural design allows Sydney-based IREN to purchase equipment in installments over an agreed period. According to relevant documents, Pacific Investment Management Corporation (PIMCO) also participated in this financing. An interest rate of 9% was applied to both parts of the fund, and the period was two and a half years after the funds were disbursed.

Blue Owl senior managing director Kurt Tenenbaum said the financing “combined GPU equipment financing with direct loan underwriting to IREN” and was funded through its credit division. He called the investment structure “unique” and ranked among the largest transactions of the same type.

This debt will help iREN expand the computing capacity of the Mackenzie data center campus in British Columbia.

As an asset management agency with assets of $319 billion, Blue Owl has been at the forefront of major AI projects. Representative projects include Meta Platforms Inc. (META.US)'s Hyperion project in Louisiana, as well as large-scale projects developed in collaboration with Crusoe and Primary Digital Infrastructure in Abilene, Texas.

As new data centers are put into operation one after another, the demand for special chips continues to rise, and the scale of chip financing is expected to increase dramatically in the next few years.

IREN also operates a Bitcoin mining and data center business. When it released its earnings report on Thursday, it predicted that the capital expenditure for the 2027 fiscal year would reach 30 billion US dollars. Affected by this, its stock price fell nearly 13% on Friday.

Earlier this year, this new AI cloud service provider also reached an agreement with the NBA Golden State Warriors, and its logo will appear on the team's jersey. Blue OWL, on the other hand, holds minority shares in many other teams in the league through its HomeCourt Partners fund.