The above button links to Coinbase. Yahoo Finance is not a broker-dealer or investment adviser and does not offer securities or cryptocurrencies for sale or facilitate trading. Coinbase pays us for certain activity generated through this link. Prices displayed are informational.

May 7 (Reuters) - Nvidia will invest up to $2.1 billion in data center operator IREN, as part ‌of a broader deal to deploy up to ‌5 gigawatts of infrastructure to keep up with soaring artificial intelligence ​demand.

The tie-up, announced on Thursday, underscores the hunger for computing power amid surging adoption of AI, as frontier model developers and Big Tech firms funnel billions to secure ‌capacity.

• Shares of ⁠IREN were up around 9% in extended trading. The stock had closed at $56.85 in ⁠regular hours.

• IREN has issued to Nvidia a five-year right to buy up to 30 million shares at an ​exercise price ​of $70 per share.

• All ​four U.S. tech giants ‌reported results last week and signaled AI spending would not slow, with combined outlays set to surpass $700 billion this year.

• Thursday's partnership is intended to accelerate the deployment of large-scale AI factories by combining Nvidia's factory ‌architecture with IREN's infrastructure operations, ​the companies said.

• Future deployments are ​expected to focus ​on IREN's 2-gigawatt Sweetwater campus in Texas.

• ‌IREN last year signed a $9.7 ​billion cloud ​deal with Microsoft.

• The company is a so-called "neocloud" - firms that sell cloud computing services built on Nvidia's ​processors that allow ‌Big Tech to access computing power without building ​new data centers.

(Reporting by Zaheer Kachwala in ​Bengaluru; Editing by Sriraj Kalluvila)