Iris Energy Limited (NASDAQ:IREN) shares are trading higher Tuesday after the company appointed Morgan Stanley as a financial advisor in connection with the evaluation of AI monetization opportunities.

What Happened: Bitcoin (CRYPTO: BTC) miner Iris Energy provided a business update on Tuesday showing that it appointed Morgan Stanley as a financial advisor as it evaluates opportunities in the AI data center market.

The news comes with Iris Energy shares down about 7% over the past week following a short report from Culper Research. The stock fell more than 13% last week after Culper argued shares were significantly overvalued.

A spokesperson for Iren responded to the report saying, "As a public company we are limited in how much we can say about reports of a certain nature. We encourage debate and value intellectually honest discourse. However, not all engagement meets these standards."

"We remain focused on our growth to 30 EH/s of mining capacity this year, serving our AI cloud service customers, and pursuing monetization opportunities for our broader power and land portfolio," the spokesperson added.

At the beginning of the month, Iris Energy provided a business update and announced that its 2024 expansion was fully funded. The company highlighted its cash position of $425.3 million and zero debt and noted that it has an additional cash buffer that can provide flexibility related to procurement items for its 2025 expansion and beyond.

Iris Energy mined 233 bitcoin in June, up from 230 mined in May. The company noted at the beginning of the month that its 21% revenue jump in June reflected higher utilization of its GPU fleet and onboarding of new customers.

IREN Price Action: Iris Energy shares were up 3.21% at $12.38 at the time of publication, according to Benzinga Pro.

Photo: Benjamin Nelan from Pixabay.