Anthropic secretly leases AI cloud from bitcoin miner IREN
There is a particular absurdity to the AI industry's current moment, and it looks like this: the lab most associated with slowing AI down spent the past week locking in roughly half a trillion dollars of data-centre leases — most of them non-cancelable, many of them on the grid connections of former bitcoin mines. And it didn't announce the newest one.
The Information reported on October 11 that Anthropic has quietly signed a multiyear cloud contract with IREN, the Nasdaq-listed, Sydney-headquartered company that began life as Iris Energy, a bitcoin miner. The size and term of the deal were not disclosed. Neither Anthropic nor IREN would confirm it — "people familiar with the relationship" is as far as the reporting goes, according to AI Weekly's relay of the story.
The market, for its part, had no such reticence. IREN shares jumped about 8% in overnight trading on Sunday and another 5.5% in Monday's premarket session, per Stocktwits and Barron's. When a rumour about a cloud contract moves a stock double digits, it's usually because the rumour has a shape people already recognise. This one does.
The deal nobody announced
Back in August, on IREN's fiscal fourth-quarter earnings call, chief executive Daniel Roberts told analysts the company had signed a new multiyear contract with, in his words, "a leading frontier AI lab whose name we're not able to disclose just yet." At the time it read like the usual earnings-call theatre. It reads differently now.
IREN's pivot is one of the more aggressive in the industry. The June quarter was the first in which its AI cloud revenue ($70.5 million) exceeded its bitcoin-mining revenue ($66.7 million), and the company expects the migration to be complete by December 2026. It has already lined up the anchor tenants most AI landlords would kill for: a five-year, $9.7 billion deal with Microsoft for Nvidia GB300 GPUs out of its Childress, Texas campus, signed last November, and a five-year, $3.4 billion managed-GPU-cloud agreement with Nvidia itself from May — plus a warrant letting Nvidia buy 30 million IREN shares at $70. The stated target is a 150,000-GPU fleet and more than $4 billion in annualised AI-cloud revenue by the end of this year.
None of which means the Anthropic deal is confirmed. Treat the skepticism honestly: IREN is carrying $13.81 billion in capital commitments against $7.62 billion in cash and restricted cash, per Startup Fortune's October 2 analysis, and SemiAnalysis noted on X last week that the company's legacy British Columbia sites — Prince George and Mackenzie — are, in users' estimation, "the #1 worst site in the industry," while conceding the newer Texas campuses "look much better." The deal is real in the only sense that matters for now: The Information's reporting, eight relays, and a market that priced it in before breakfast.
The $530B sprint, in gigawatts
Zoom out and the IREN pact is a single tile in a mosaic that has become genuinely colossal. Across more than ten cloud providers including AWS and Google, Anthropic has now signed data-centre leases totalling more than 15 gigawatts, worth roughly $530 billion, according to The Information's latest tally. The roadmap runs 1.4 GW last year to 5 GW this year, 9.5 GW next year, and more than 15 GW in 2028.
What explains the urgency is the per-site revenue clock. Take the 245-megawatt facility Anthropic is leasing in Louisiana — developed by Hut 8, operated by Fluidstack, running Google TPUs from the second quarter of next year, on a 15-year, $7 billion lease with a Google financial backstop that could reach $17.7 billion with renewals. Analyst and investor estimates cited by The Information say that bringing that single site online one month early would add more than $1.3 billion in sales, assuming the capacity is used for inference. Infrastructure advisers Occam Edge put the chip rent at about $200 million a month, which implies gross margins near 85% — before training and labour costs, which are doing a great deal of quiet work in that sentence.
"Bringing the site's 245 MW of usable capacity online one month early would add $1.3bn+ in revenue," wrote AI Weekly's Ann Davis Vaughan, running the per-site math. "Through our partnership with Anthropic and Fluidstack, we are aligning power, data center design, and compute deployment into an integrated platform capable of delivering at gigawatt-scale," said Hut 8 chief executive Asher Genoot when the Louisiana deal was announced last December. When a month of construction delay costs more than a billion dollars of foregone revenue, you can see why nobody is waiting for the press release.
Built on the bones of bitcoin mines
The strangest and most under-told thread in all of this is who Anthropic is renting from. The Information's reporting, via AI Weekly, puts it bluntly: the capacity race "increasingly depends on current and former bitcoin miners such as Hut 8, TeraWulf, IREN and Nscale" — companies that happen to hold scarce grid connections at former smelter and hydrogen sites.
Think about what that means. The binding constraint on the AI buildout isn't the chips. It isn't even the money, though Broadcom's CEO has said capital — not chips — is AI's real bottleneck. It's the plug: a grid connection with hundreds of megawatts of deliverable power, permitted, cooled, and already wired. Bitcoin miners spent a decade accumulating exactly that asset in places with cheap hydro and friendlier regulators — British Columbia, Texas, upstate New York — and now the AI labs are buying the mines to get the sockets.
IREN is the pattern in miniature: legacy sites in Canal Flats, Mackenzie and Prince George, British Columbia, tied to former pulp-mill power; newer AI campuses in Childress and Sweetwater, Texas; a fleet marching toward 150,000 GPUs. The bitcoin era built the shell. The AI era is moving into it.
A small profit — read the fine print
Somewhere in the middle of all this leasing, The Information added a line that deserves careful handling: Anthropic, it said, recorded "a small profit" in the second quarter of this year. That is new phrasing, not a new number. Bloomberg reported back in mid-August, on documents shown to prospective investors, that preliminary Q2 revenue had topped $11.5 billion — against $787 million a year earlier and $4.73 billion in Q1 — with positive adjusted operating income. Adjusted operating income is not net income and not cash flow, and the figures were preliminary. The honest version: inference is already paying for a meaningful share of the machine, which is more than most AI labs can say.
The rest of the prospectus math, reviewed by Reuters from the confidential filing, is where the vertigo sets in. At least $518 billion in compute commitments over the next decade across six partners — Google $111.1 billion, Amazon $110 billion, Microsoft $31.4 billion, Broadcom-related equipment leases around $161.2 billion — with roughly 80% of it non-cancelable or payable regardless of actual usage. Last year the company generated about $4.6 billion in revenue, up roughly twelvefold, against an operating loss above $8 billion and a $7.33 billion compute bill. Two customers account for roughly a quarter of revenue, and the largest clients aren't on long-term contracts.
We checked the relay chain ourselves: eight outlets picked up The Information's IREN report within 24 hours, but none of the three outlets that covered Anthropic's September prospectus tally — Reuters, TechCrunch, DataCenterDynamics — has touched the IREN deal. That's not a verdict on its truth. It's a measure of how fast this story is moving relative to the institutions trying to cover it.
Our take: the lab that rents fastest wins
There is an irony here that Anthropic's leadership cannot be enjoying. This is the lab whose chief executive has spent the year arguing the industry should pace itself — and it has just signed the largest set of take-or-pay compute obligations in the history of technology, on terms that assume inference demand never blinks. If AI's debt machine just hit a wall in September, Anthropic's answer was to keep driving and finance the wall too: a $42 billion convertible-note facility from Broadcom, usable only against its TPU lease obligations, and a $60 billion bank-debt package assembled this month.
The Hock Tan thesis — capital, not chips, is the constraint — is half right. Anthropic's sprint suggests the real constraint is time: every month a site sits dark is a billion dollars that never comes back, so the lab that rents fastest wins, and the miners who own the grid connections get to name their price. It is a colossal bet, and it is not obviously a bad one: 85%-margin inference revenue is the closest thing this industry has to a money printer. But 80% non-cancelable means Anthropic has now bet the company on the proposition that demand for Claude never stops growing. The wave of data-centre debt raises, like Bain's Bridge seeking $6.6B, is the rest of the industry making the same bet in smaller type.
Sources: The Information (via AI Weekly, ChosunBiz, Zubiqo, Stocktwits, Invezz, Barron's, CryptoBriefing relays); Bloomberg (Aug 14–15, Sept 1); Reuters (prospectus review, Sept 28–29); Hut 8 / Fluidstack announcements (Dec 2025); Startup Fortune (Oct 2); Occam Edge estimates via The Information.
By TechPulse USA — New York and Sydney desks . TechPulse USA is an independent tech publication covering the AI buildout as it happens: the money, the machines, and the grid underneath them.
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