IREN acquires Spain's Nostrum Group in European AI cloud push

IREN Limited has completed the acquisition of Ingenostrum, S.L., trading as Nostrum Group, a Spanish developer of grid-connected AI data centres. The deal marks the NASDAQ-listed company's first foothold in Europe, adding approximately 490MW of secured, grid-connected power capacity in Spain alongside a further development pipeline. Nostrum's more than 50 staff, spanning development, engineering, construction and operations, will continue under the IREN brand.

The financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed in IREN's announcement. No revenue figures, valuation metrics, or timeline for the broader development pipeline were provided.

The deal

Daniel Roberts, co-founder and co-chief executive of IREN, cited Spain's renewable energy abundance and fibre connectivity as the primary reasons for the market entry. "Nostrum gives us secured power today along with a development pipeline and a great local team we're excited to work with," he said. Gabriel Nebreda, who led Nostrum Group as chief executive, said the combined entity would allow the Spanish infrastructure pipeline to be developed "at the speed and scale Europe's rapidly growing demand for AI infrastructure requires."

IREN describes itself as a vertically integrated AI cloud provider, supplying large-scale data centres and GPU clusters for training and inference workloads. Its existing portfolio is concentrated in renewable-rich regions of North America, with this acquisition representing its stated entry into both Europe and the Asia-Pacific region as strategic targets.

Market context

European AI infrastructure is attracting significant capital as hyperscalers, sovereign cloud programmes and enterprise buyers race to satisfy growing GPU-compute demand. Spain has emerged as a credible location for new data centre builds: electricity costs remain competitive relative to northern European markets, the country has an above-average share of installed renewable capacity, and sub-sea cable landings on the Iberian coast provide low-latency connectivity to both the Americas and Africa.

IREN enters a market where established operators including Equinix, Digital Realty and NTT Data Centres already run significant Spanish campuses, and where a number of specialist AI infrastructure developers are competing for grid connections and planning consents. Securing 490MW of committed grid capacity is a meaningful differentiator at a moment when power availability is widely regarded as the binding constraint on new data centre development across the EU.

Regulatory read-across

Operating AI cloud infrastructure in Spain brings IREN within scope of the EU AI Act's general-purpose AI provisions, which are phasing in through 2026 and 2027, as well as the Network and Information Security 2 (NIS2) Directive, which came into force across EU member states in late 2024 and imposes incident-reporting and resilience obligations on critical digital infrastructure providers. Spain's grid regulator, Red Eléctrica, has also tightened connection-queue management in recent years, making the pre-secured capacity that Nostrum brings materially valuable.

For investors, the near-term milestones to watch are the pace at which IREN begins converting the development pipeline into operational capacity, the identity of anchor customers, and whether the company publishes power-usage effectiveness or sustainability metrics aligned with European disclosure expectations under the EU Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive.