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IREN ( IREN ) expanded its equity offering to $6B and shares fell 8.5%. The company has purchased 50,000+ Nvidia B300 GPUs toward 150,000-unit fleet targeting $3.7B in revenue. AMC Entertainment Dropped from $300+/share to $1+/share after the same decline.
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IREN is financing the expansion of its AI data center through a large equity offering that has raised concerns about the downside, as have AMC’s frequent share issuances during the meme-stock cycle.
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Bitcoin miner turned – AI cloud operator IREN (NASDAQ: IREN ) surprised investors with a surprise announcement this week: It expanded its over-the-counter (ATM) equity offering program to $6 billion — nearly half of its current market capitalization. The news sent shares tumbling 8.5% in one session as fears of a slowdown hit the market.
While the reduction won’t be all at once — the ATM structure allows the company to pour new shares into the open market over time when it chooses — the move immediately evokes painful memories for a long time. AMC Entertainment (NYSE: AMC) shareholders.
During the meme stock frenzy of 2021, AMC frequently issued large amounts of new stock, ballooning its share count and crushing value. What once traded well over $700 per share (for 1-10 – after a 1-10 reverse stock split) at the height of the frenzy now sits at just over $1 per share. As the saying goes, history doesn’t repeat itself, but it often does.
Read: The analyst who called NVIDIA in 2010 Just naming his top 10 AI stocks
IREN has filed a new prospectus supplement to replace its previous $1 billion ATM program, which previously sold 66.7 million shares for $1 billion. The new $6 billion facility gives the company greater flexibility to gradually sell common shares through a syndicate of investment banks, with the proceeds earmarked for general corporate purposes, including data center expansion, hardware purchases and working capital.
The program does not require a large block sale — shares can be offered opportunistically at prevailing market prices. This structure provides IREN with continuous access to capital without being locked in early.
The announcement coincides with IREN’s aggressive push into AI infrastructure. The company revealed that it has signed purchase agreements for more than 50,000 Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) B300 GPUs, increasing its total fleet to 150,000 units. Deployment is planned in phases in the second half of 2026 at air-cooled data centers in Mackenzie, BC, and Childress, TX. This expanded project management capacity will support more than $3.7 billion in annual revenue from the AI cloud segment by the end of 2026.
Over the past eight months, IREN has already secured $9.3 billion in various funding sources, including customer prepayments, convertible notes, and GPU financing, to cover an estimated $3.5 billion in additional capex for GPU rollout, servers, networking, and related equipment.
AMC Entertainment followed a similar — but more aggressive — path during and after its meme stock boom. Facing pandemic-era losses and heavy debt, the theater chain repeatedly tapped equity markets while its share price was boosted by retail enthusiasm. Beyond the standard common stock offerings and ATM programs, AMC created and issued “APE” (AMC Preferred Equity) units in 2022. These preferred shares are traded separately from common stock and are initially distributed to existing shareholders on a one-to-one basis.
In late 2022 and 2023, AMC pursued a complex restructuring that involved converting APE units into common shares, coupled with a reverse stock split. The exchange turned what used to be hundreds of millions of APE units into the number of common shares, while share buybacks helped maintain listing compliance and helped raise more.
Management continually sells newly issued shares (and APEs) directly to the open market, often against existing owners during periods of high volatility and retail price volatility. Each wave of issuance weakens property values dramatically and erodes the value of each share as the initial hype wears off. The number of shares fell from the tens of millions pre-mania to the hundreds of millions, and post-recession adjustments still left existing investors with a significantly lower proportion of ownership.
Critics, including many retail investors, favor the stock’s prolonged decline as a priority for corporate survival and debt reduction to protect long-term shareholder value.
The two situations are not exactly the same as the key differences are obvious. AMC struggled for financial survival, using cutbacks to avoid bankruptcy and restructure debt. IREN’s proposal, in contrast, is designed to fund aggressive growth — specifically the purchase of tens of thousands of Nvidia GPUs to expand its AI cloud capacity toward a goal of $3.7 billion in annual runrate revenue. If IREN can effectively deploy capital and generate growth that will increase its share price, the impact on existing shareholders will be far less devastating than what happened to AMC.
However, such a large offering also suggests that the company had a few other avenues open to raising money, which is concerning in itself. While IREN’s large equity offering may not be a sister to AMC’s analytical practices, it is at least a cousin or two.
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