IREN ended the week at $37.07 — a rare bounce of 10% on the week, but only after shedding another 9% on Friday and still down 32% over the past month, all while its short base quietly set a new high.
The borrow picture described in last week's note has not eased — it has deepened. Short interest climbed again, reaching 33.2% of the free float by Thursday's close, up 14% on the week and 66% over the past month. More than 94 million shares are now held short, a record for this dataset. Availability has not recovered. After touching a 52-week low of 3.3% mid-week, it closed slightly higher at 4.1% — still in extreme territory, meaning roughly one share remains available for every 24 already borrowed. The lending pool has been fully saturated for most of the past week, with utilisation pinned at 100% for five consecutive sessions. Against this backdrop, the cost to borrow remains puzzlingly cheap at 0.88%, down 17% on the week — confirming that the existing short book is entrenched and barriers face new entrants specifically, not the incumbents. Options traders have shifted more defensive: the put/call ratio is running at 1.06, above its 20-day average of 0.98 and near the 52-week high of 1.08, though the z-score of 1.1 keeps this in the elevated-but-not-extreme zone.
The Street is holding constructive positions even as the stock continues to fall sharply below consensus. HC Wainwright raised its target to $90 this week, and Canaccord Genuity reiterated its Buy and $79 target on July 21. Macquarie remains at Outperform with a $90 target. Across recent coverage, every analyst action has been a Buy, Outperform, or Overweight, and the mean target of $81.40 implies more than 100% upside from current levels. The factor scores reinforce the disconnect: the analyst recommendation differential ranks in the 98th percentile, meaning the gap between analyst optimism and price performance is wider than nearly every name in the universe. Meanwhile, earnings momentum has deteriorated sharply — the 30- and 90-day EPS momentum scores rank in the bottom 2nd percentile — reflecting the FY26/27 estimate cuts driven by Bitcoin operations winding down and back-weighted GPU deployment. The short score ranks in the 7th percentile, underlining that bearish positioning is near the top of the universe.
The bull case rests on the $3.4 billion Nvidia AI cloud deal, a Microsoft partnership, and a stated $3.7 billion ARR target that — at higher GPU pricing — bulls argue could eventually support a valuation north of $200 per share on cloud deal value alone. The bear case is more immediate: the gap between when Bitcoin revenues fade and when GPU deployments generate meaningful cash is a visible valley, and the earnings revision trajectory has been brutal. BlackRock added 3.8 million shares as recently as June, and the co-founders William and Daniel Roberts still hold approximately 6.6% each — though both sold 1 million shares apiece in September 2025 at prices well below today's analyst targets.
The setup now is an unusual one: a heavily shorted stock with near-zero borrow availability, a cost to borrow that refuses to spike, analysts who have not followed the stock lower, and earnings due August 28 with the previous print delivering a 4% one-day drop. How IREN's Q4 results frame the timing and scale of its GPU revenue ramp — and whether that closes the credibility gap with analyst targets — is the number to watch.
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