Anthropic inks unannounced IREN cloud deal, report says

Anthropic has signed a multiyear cloud agreement with IREN ↘ 1.46% that neither company has announced, The Information reported. The report says Anthropic is under pressure to bring capacity online quickly across roughly $530 billion in data-center leases. According to AI Weekly's summary of The Information's reporting, "people familiar with the relationship say Anthropic also has an unannounced multiyear cloud deal with IREN." The value and length of the agreement were not disclosed.aiweekly+1

The reported deal shows how much the Claude maker now relies on companies that started out as bitcoin ↗ 0.84% miners and still control hard-to-get grid connections. The Information's newsletter says Anthropic's build-out "increasingly depends on current and former bitcoin miners such as Hut 8, TeraWulf, IREN and Nscale". Anthropic also has previously disclosed arrangements with Amazon Web Services Amazon.com, Inc. ↗ 3.29%, Google Alphabet Inc. ↗ 0.87% and more than a dozen other providers.aiweekly

Why the timing matters

The Information's analysis focuses on how much money Anthropic makes from each month a site is running. Bringing one site's 245 megawatts of usable capacity online "one month early would add $1.3bn+ in revenue," the piece says. That math helps explain why Anthropic is pushing partners to build faster.aiweekly

The report comes days after a separate estimate, first published by The Motley Fool on Oct. 6, that Anthropic plans to commit about $518 billion to cloud services and computing over the next decade. That total includes non-cancelable obligations to Google, Amazon and Microsoft ↗ 2.38%.ground

IREN's path to Anthropic

IREN, a Nasdaq-listed company that has moved from bitcoin mining into AI cloud services, had been linked to Anthropic for months. In July, The Australian Financial Review reported that Anthropic had privately sought at least 1.4 gigawatts of Australian data-center capacity. IREN was among the operators that received the request, along with CDC Data Centres, AirTrunk, NextDC and Stack. IREN pointed to its Bundey campus in South Australia, which already has a secured transmission connection. The company also has an AI cloud contract with Microsoft valued at about $9.7 billion and a $3.4 billion five-year deal with Nvidia ↘ 0.52%.tradingview+1

Looking to Europe

Anthropic is also trying to secure capacity outside the U.S. In April, CNBC reported that the company was hiring a London-based "Transaction Principal" to lead sourcing and negotiations for compute capacity in Europe. The job pays up to £270,000 and is described as "critical" to powering Anthropic's next-generation systems. The role covers Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam, Paris and Dublin, as well as the Nordics, where lower energy costs are drawing AI projects. Anthropic is also considering direct capacity deals with data-center developers around the world.economictimes.indiatimes

Rivals are moving in the same direction. OpenAI has already opened a Stargate project in Norway with Nscale and Aker.economictimes.indiatimes