IREN Sweetwater Hub data center, Sweetwater, Texas

IREN, the Nasdaq-listed former bitcoin miner, is building the Sweetwater Hub, a 2,000-megawatt data center campus outside Sweetwater in Fisher County, West Texas. The campus has two sites, Sweetwater 1 and Sweetwater 2, set to total 2,200 acres; in early May 2026 IREN said it had turned on grid power to the 1,700-acre Sweetwater 1 site, with Sweetwater 2 expected to follow in 2028.

IREN, formerly Iris Energy, was founded in 2019 and is winding down its bitcoin mining to put money into AI computing. Microsoft is its biggest named customer, with a five-year, $9.7 billion deal for access to IREN's Nvidia GPUs, deployed at IREN's other Texas campus, in Childress. David Shaw, IREN's chief operating officer, told KTXS that about 300 construction workers were on site at Sweetwater, that he expected that number to triple or quadruple within six months, and that the finished campus would employ more than 200 people.

Shaw said Fisher County was picked for its cheap renewable power and its existing electrical lines: "We've switched it around and brought the data center out to the source of the power, where the infrastructure already exists." KTXS reported that some residents have raised concerns about traffic, power demands and the effect on rural communities as large AI facilities move into West Texas.

IREN co-CEO Daniel Roberts wrote in August 2026 that the company's data centers "don't evaporate water for cooling; we recirculate it in a modern closed-loop system," and that IREN builds its sites with setbacks from homes.

Sweetwater 1's power hookup came three months before Gov. Greg Abbott ordered a statewide audit of data centers seeking Texas grid connections on August 3, 2026. That audit does not touch a site already connected, and IREN expects to turn on power at Sweetwater 2 in 2028.