On 27 August 2026, IREN's (Nasdaq: IREN) FY26 10-K put two sentences in the revenue note: as of 30 June, remaining performance obligations (RPO) under ASC 606 were about $5.1bn; the total contract value of lease arrangements was about $11.4bn; together, about $16.6bn. The earnings release issued the same day quoted only the combined figure.
All three numbers are real, but they are not the same thing. This piece does one job: it separates the two sets of books and shows how anyone can reproduce the split from the filings.
Why there are two sets of books
IREN buys its own GPUs and builds its own halls, and customers rent in two ways. Pay-by-the-GPU-hour arrangements are service contracts under ASC 606: revenue is recognized as used, and the unperformed part goes into RPO. Dedicated clusters rented by the building are different, and Note 4 of the 10-K says so plainly: those contracts contain a lease component — the GPUs and the dedicated hall — that predominates, so the whole contract is accounted for as an operating lease with IREN as lessor, starting from customer acceptance and running three to five years. A lease is not a performance obligation, so it does not enter RPO; it has its own disclosure line, "total contract value of lease arrangements".
The consequence: in FY26, FY25 and FY24, IREN recognized zero lease revenue. Not a dollar of the $11.4bn had reached the income statement by 30 June; the first dedicated cluster was accepted on 13 August.
How to find it: three notes, two tags
First, the revenue note (Note 4): the RPO timing table — IREN gives $0.9bn in the next twelve months, $1.3bn in months 13 to 24, and $2.9bn after that — and, in the same passage, a separate sentence for the lease contract total. Second, the deferred revenue note (Note 20): ASC 606 contract liabilities and ASC 842 "deferred lease revenue" are shown separately, $219m against $1,624m at IREN, and the latter is expressly described as not a 606 contract liability but prepayments for tranches that have not yet commenced. Third, the VIE note (Note 26): deferred revenue of $1,013m inside the financing subsidiary exceeds total non-current 606 contract liabilities, so it can only sit in the 842 book — the circumstantial evidence for which contract is on lease accounting.
In XBRL the two books carry separate tags: RevenueRemainingPerformanceObligation (606) and LessorOperatingLeasePaymentsToBeReceived (842). IREN also filed a company-specific extension tag that adds the two, with a value of 16.6B.
Two tags that mislead
The first is a "polluted" RPO tag: IREN's FQ2 10-Q used the same RPO element, dated 2 November 2025, to tag $9.7bn — the total value of the Microsoft contract — alongside the quarter-end RPO of $289m dated 31 December 2025, in the same filing. Any program that pulls by tag without checking the date context will read $9.7bn as a quarter-end RPO. The fix: use only instant values whose date matches the balance-sheet date.
The second is on the cash-flow statement: of FY26 operating cash flow of $2.10bn, the $1.84bn increase in deferred revenue is tagged in full as IncreaseDecreaseInContractWithCustomerLiability, the 606 contract-liability movement; on the balance-sheet basis, 606 contract liabilities rose only about $0.22bn in the year, and the other $1.62bn is 842 lease prepayment. Anyone rebuilding "contract liability movement" from cash-flow tags will book lease prepayments as 606. The fix: take the split from the balance-sheet note.
How the peers split
| Company | Model | Revenue standard | "Contract" disclosure | Time scale |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| CoreWeave | Owns GPUs | All 606 (the 10-K records an 842 test: customers do not control the underlying hardware) | RPO $103.7bn | Out to month 78 |
| Nebius | Owns GPUs | 606; RPO definition excludes contracts with original terms under one year | RPO $37.5bn | 3 to 5 years |
| IREN | Owns GPUs, dual-track | Hourly under 606; dedicated clusters under 842 | RPO $5.1bn + leases $11.4bn | 3 to 5 years |
| APLD / CORZ / CIFR / HUT / WULF | Landlords; tenants own the GPUs | 842 lessor | Base-term nominal rent, $11.4bn to $35.8bn | 10 to 20 years |
Source: latest 10-K / 10-Q / 20-F revenue notes of each company.
The thing to read in this table is scale, not size: a landlord's "contract value" is a decade or two of nominal rent, a cloud provider's RPO is three to five years of service contracts, and the same EV-to-contract multiple differs by an order of magnitude between the two groups because of time, not valuation. IREN sits in between: its RPO timing table is fully recognized within 60 months, shorter than CoreWeave's 78; comparing it with landlords or with cloud providers first requires choosing which book to use.
Where this sits in the report
The split between the two books and their respective realization timelines form the spine of Chapters 2 and 3 of our IREN deep dive (first edition): the four-rung ladder from contracted ARR to GAAP quarterly revenue, the Microsoft contract clause by clause, the timeline of the four Horizon buildings, and what follows from placing five-year GPU depreciation and two tiers of secured debt on the same timeline. Methodology is at Research methods; for the same family of basis problems, see TeraWulf's contract value vs. commenced-lease receivable and Vertiv stopped disclosing orders.
Research content; not investment advice.