The Information: Anthropic has an undisclosed multi-year cloud deal with former bitcoin miner IREN; neither company has confirmed

Why it matters

【Key points】

The Information reported on October 11, in Ann Davis Vaughan's piece "The Attractive Economics Behind Anthropic Data Center Sprint," that people familiar with the matter say Anthropic has an undisclosed multi-year cloud contract with IREN, a former bitcoin miner turned AI cloud provider. No value, term or capacity was given. This is a media report; neither Anthropic nor IREN has publicly confirmed it.

The piece says Anthropic has signed about $530 billion of data center leases with AWS, Google and more than a dozen other providers, many of them current or former miners such as Hut 8, TeraWulf, IREN and Nscale. Analysts cited estimate that bringing a 245 MW Louisiana site online one month early would add over $1.3 billion in revenue.

【Verifiable】

IREN's fiscal 2026 results on August 27, filed with the SEC, disclosed a new multi-year AI cloud contract with "a leading frontier AI lab" without naming it; Reuters reported the same day that the lab was undisclosed. IREN's named customers include Microsoft (five years, $9.7 billion), and Nvidia said in May it would invest up to $2.1 billion in IREN. The Information is paywalled; ChosunBiz relayed the report on October 12. Whether the August contract is this deal cannot be verified.

【Our read】

This is our judgment. 1. If accurate, Anthropic's compute is spreading beyond Google and Amazon to independent operators holding grid connections. The scarce input is no longer just chips but powered capacity that can come online fast.

2. Big customers are validating the miner-to-AI-cloud pivot: these firms' real asset is land with power secured. The risk sits there too. They fund GPUs with heavy borrowing and depend on long contracts from a few customers, so a slowdown hits them first.

3. Until either party confirms, size and terms are speculation. Watch IREN's next filings or an Anthropic statement.