In partnership with
Australian AI infrastructure provider IREN is acquiring cloud‑native software specialist Mirantis in an all‑stock deal valued at about $625 million. Now you may be wondering: Why? The answer's simple: IREN, best known for its large‑scale data center footprint, wants to be an AI powerhouse. To make that happen, the company is betting that integrating its data centers and Mirantis's Kubernetes and cloud-native software stack will give it an edge in the surging AI infrastructure market.
With Mirantis’ software and services, IREN aims to shift from simply offering GPU‑rich facilities to selling a full AI cloud platform that includes orchestration, observability, lifecycle management, and enterprise support. The hope is that a full data center and software infrastructure stack will command higher margins and appeal to enterprises looking for alternatives to hyperscale public clouds for AI workloads.
What Mirantis brings to the plan is its comprehensive open-source, cloud-native software stack. It started as an OpenStack integrator and has evolved into a broader cloud‑native infrastructure company centered on Kubernetes, multi‑cloud operations, developer tools, and, more recently, AI‑focused platforms. Its portfolio now spans Kubernetes management, container platforms, and the k0rdent AI infrastructure stack, all of which have been validated under NVIDIA’s AI Cloud Ready program.
Mirantis also brings over 1,500 enterprise customers to the table. This gives IREN a ready‑made channel into organizations already running cloud‑native workloads. For Mirantis, the acquisition pairs its software and operational expertise with the large‑scale GPU, power, and data center capacity that many of its AI‑minded customers are seeking but cannot easily put together on their own.
For those of you who are new to Mirantis's AI plans, K0rdent AI is the company's enterprise platform for building, deploying, and operating AI applications and inference services on top of Kubernetes. It sits on top of the open-source k0rdent project. This stack is aimed at platform engineers, MLOps teams, and service providers who need to manage AI workloads at scale across clouds and on‑prem.
Oh, and for those who've been wondering about this newly merged company and Mirantis's open-source plans, Mirantis CTO Shaun O'Meara wants you to know that the company's staying loyal to its open-source roots. In a blog post, O'Meara said, "Our contributions to k0rdent, Kubernetes, k0s, OpenStack, and more continue. The maintainers and contributors working on those projects stay in place. k0rdent remains open source. K0s will continue to be curated. Our participation in community governance, our upstream contributions, and our commitment to open standards are not transitional. They are structural to how we build products and how we engage with the ecosystem. That does not change."
As for everything else, Mirantis, Alex Freedland, Mirantis's co-founder and CEO, wants to assure customers, partners, and employees that the company will be staying its course. There will be no radical changes, except now. If you need data center power, Mirantis can provide that as well. In short, the deal is a strategic match between “infrastructure at scale” and the software needed to make that infrastructure useful for AI workloads.
Since this deal was signed, Nvidia announced a partnership under which IREN will provide up to 5 gigawatts of Nvidia DSX designs to power AI workloads across its global data centers. This bodes well for the pairing of IREN and Mirantis.
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