Shares in IREN Ltd popped 11.4% after the Bitcoin miner posted $86 million in revenue for July, outperforming industry heavyweight MARA Holdings in Bitcoin production.

On Wednesday, IREN reported mining 728 Bitcoin (BTC) in July, beating MARA’s 703 BTC mined over the same period despite having a smaller deployed hashrate — 50 exahashes per second (EH/s) compared to MARA’s 58.9 EH/s.

IREN reported an average hashrate over July of 45.4 EH/s, signalling that a majority of its machines stayed online and productive throughout the month.

IREN’s strong results come amid a rise in mining difficulty of late, driving up energy consumption and putting pressure on miners’ profitability unless they adapt with more efficient equipment or lower energy costs. 

MARA’s performance in July underperformed from June but came on the back of solid second-quarter earnings that saw its revenue jump 64% year-on-year to $238 million. It also holds the second-largest Bitcoin treasury at 50,000 BTC, trailing only Michael Saylor’s Strategy.

IREN shares soar double-digits

Shares in IREN Ltd (IREN) closed trading on Wednesday up 11.4% to $18.32, while most rival Bitcoin miners closed the day at gains between 1% and 5%.

The news also pushed IREN’s market cap to $4.11 billion, the second-highest among public Bitcoin miners, overtaking Riot Platforms and Core Scientific and nestling behind only MARA.

IREN continues expansion into AI

IREN said $2.3 million of its total $86 million revenue in July came from its expanding artificial intelligence cloud business, part of the firm’s plans to diversify beyond Bitcoin mining.

IREN co-founder and co-CEO Daniel Roberts said its seeing “accelerating interest” in its NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs made for powering AI. IREN purchased 2,400 of the GPUs in early July, with Roberts adding its seen an initial delivery of 256 units.

Related: Cango posts ‘massive’ July Bitcoin haul, boosting corporate treasury

Roberts added the firm running Bitcoin mining rigs and GPUs side-by-side “underscores the adaptability of our infrastructure and our ability to capture the market opportunity ahead.”

IREN once pinned as “overvalued”

IREN’s July results come around 12 months after short-selling firm Culper Research said IREN was “wildly overvalued” and the company talked a “big game” about high-performance computing without investing enough to compete seriously in AI.

Culper compared IREN’s efforts to competing to win the Monaco Grand Prix but arriving at the track in a Toyota Prius.

Since then, IREN shares fell from $12.31 to as low as $5.59 in April, but have rallied over 227% to $18.32 in the past four months.

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