SAN FRANCISCO – The Warriors’ new jersey sponsor is a major force in the artificial intelligence race sweeping the Bay Area.
At a corporate event Thursday at Chase Center, Warriors owner Joe Lacob and star forward Jimmy Butler sat next to IREN founder Daniel Roberts as part of a panel discussion.
IREN is described as a “vertically integrated AI cloud provider that provides GPU clusters for AI training and inference to customers in the Bay Area and around the world.”
Terms of the deal were not made public, but Sportico reported that the sponsorship deal is worth $50 million a year. In addition to the Warriors, the WNBA’s Valkyries and Santa Cruz Warriors will also wear IREN patches on their jerseys.
Warriors owner Joe Lacob said the team continued its partnership with Rakuten, but decided to change its jersey sponsor and is fully committed to implementing AI. He told the audience that the Warriors are incorporating AI into as many aspects of the organization as possible.
“I don’t know if you’ve heard of it, but[AI]is on the rise. They’re really the ideal partner for us,” Lacob said, adding that the use of AI is “obviously invasive, it’s ubiquitous, and I don’t think we know all the ways to use it yet.”
Australia-based IREN is currently building data centers in Canada, Texas, and Oklahoma. In October, IREN announced a $9.7 billion deal with Microsoft to support the tech giant’s AI cloud infrastructure.
Last month, IREN partnered with Santa Clara-based NVIDIA on another AI infrastructure program.
Because data centers generate continuous noise and require large amounts of electricity and fresh water to maintain, the negative environmental impact of such facilities is hotly debated.
When asked about the data center controversy, Roberts focused on the number of jobs and economic opportunities the facility presents, a sentiment echoed by Warriors Chief Commercial Officer Mike Kitts during questions after the presentation.
“I think it’s not just a data center problem, but it’s a problem with their approach. I think when you take a community-first approach to any business, it comes down to, ‘Do we see the world the same way? Do we have similar values?'” Kitts told Bay Area News Group.
The next day, Friday, when Warriors rookies Jaxel Lendeborg and Rajai Jones held up their new jerseys, they already had a bright green IREN patch sewn on the left side.
