Funds managed by Blue Owl committed $2.4 billion to finance IREN's purchase of NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra GPUs for its Mackenzie data center campus in British Columbia. The structure is equipment finance, not corporate debt — the hardware itself stands as the collateral.
The deal splits evenly between a $1.2 billion senior secured term loan and $1.2 billion in senior secured notes, according to an August 28 press release. Rather than releasing the full amount at once, the facility draws in tranches as hardware is delivered and commissioned.
Shares closed 12.53% lower on August 29, the day after the announcement, on dollar volume of about $3.2 billion.
The case for treating GPUs as lendable infrastructure rests on an argument about fungibility. NVIDIA's Nico Caprez said in the release that the company's software stack lets its chips serve any customer's workload, making them more interchangeable than purpose-built hardware. That, the release argues, makes NVIDIA infrastructure an investable asset class for long-term capital.
Blue Owl's Kurt Tenenbaum, a senior managing director, said the firm drew on operating experience across more than 100 data centers to shape the facility's design. Blue Owl manages about $319 billion in assets across its three investment platforms.
IREN says the deal extends a buildout backed by a global development pipeline the company puts at more than 5 gigawatts. IREN chief financial officer Anthony Lewis said in the release the company is expanding capacity for both AI training and inference customers.
NVIDIA's Caprez described the transaction as "a repeatable model for financing AI infrastructure at scale."