Mindscape studio / Shutterstock.com Quick Read The Stocks: IREN (IREN) surged over 13% after securing a $1.6 billion AI deal with Dell Technologies (DELL) , positioning itself as an agile and fast-moving operator. The AI trade is heating up just in time for summer, and as we enter the month of June, the SpaceX IPO could crank up the heat several notches as a flood of investors finally get a chance to own a piece of Elon Musk's space and AI empire. Who knows? It's speculated that Tesla ( NASDAQ:TSLA ) might even be rolled in at some point down the road, injecting Optimus humanoid robots and electric vehicles (EVs) into the package. Any way you look at it, the excitement is almost palpable as we head into June. While I wouldn't place market orders on day one, even if one is comfortable paying a sky-high multiple and a valuation closer to the $2 trillion level than $1.25-1.5 trillion, I do acknowledge many Elon Musk fans have been waiting for far too long. And when they get their chance to punch a ticket, don't count on them to walk away from IPO day empty-handed, even if it means paying a price that entails a more than $2 trillion market cap. Add the other AI IPOs poised to drop in the second half of the year, and it feels like the retail crowd might be collectively headed towards the same thing, and perhaps at the expense of perfectly good and far cheaper names across the board. SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI are coming in hot, and it promises to make 2026 the IPO year to beat. In terms of size, I don't think it will ever get topped. Regardless, there are heated corners of the AI scene that might be even timelier. Beyond the mega IPO slate, the Bitcoin-miners-turned-AI-data-center plays look underrated As investors stay high on the semiconductor stocks while gravitating back to some of the Magnificent Seven and keeping the AI IPO slate on their radar, questions linger as to whether there are still deals to be had in AI in the lead-up to some mega IPOs. Given the flows into IPOs and out of other corners of the market, perhaps it makes sense to wait for the IPO impact on the broad market before going bargain hunting. At this juncture, I think there's still value in the Bitcoin (CRYPTO:BTC) miners that transitioned into AI data center firms. Indeed, that's where the gold rush has moved these days, as Bitcoin has been stuck in a tough spot while the rewards for mining have gravitated lower. When you think about it, the business of modern AI data centers and crypto mining isn't the world's different. At the end of the day, you're leveraging hardware (like GPUs), which consumes a lot of power, to produce something. Whether it's a small bit of Bitcoin or tokens for AI, I do think that investors shouldn't discount the Bitcoin-miners-turned-AI-neocloud firms. In many ways, they're doing a pretty decent job of pivoting, and their shares have been rewarded accordingly in the past year. IREN is coming back, and new highs might not be far off Whether we're talking about an aggressive move like IREN ( NASDAQ:IREN ), which soared more than 13% on Wednesday after news of a $1.6 billion deal with Dell Technologies ( NYSE:DELL ) on AI, or another crypto miner that's getting into the AI compute game, I think there's still a case for buying after the latest recovery melt-up in the shares. IREN is moving fast on AI, and it's proven to be quite an agile operator. The firm has proven it can procure the latest and greatest hardware at a blistering pace while others wait patiently in line. As the big deals keep coming, I'm inclined to think a name like IREN is a worthy hyper-growth addition, even if it means paying a fairly hefty multiple. What excites me most about a name like IREN, though, is the slew of hedge fund buying activity in the last quarter. From Leopold Aschenbrenner's Situational Awareness, who added to their position to other smart-money managers who sprinkled a bit of exposure on top (comprising less than 1% of the portfolio), I think the case for added spice makes sense. As shares look to break out, I think the case for nibbling is improving. A weighting of over 10%, as Situational Awareness had at the end of the last quarter, might be too much for most. But something like a sub-1% allocation, I think, might make sense.

Source: AOL.com

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