IREN shares jump on report of multi-year Anthropic cloud deal
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The news: Shares in Nasdaq-listed IREN rose more than 4% after The Information reported it had struck an unannounced deal with Anthropic.
The frontier AI lab and the Sydney-based neocloud have entered into a multi-year cloud deal, according to unnamed sources familiar with the relationship.
Anthropic’s ability to win the compute race against OpenAI may depend on former bitcoin miners such as IREN, Nscale, TeraWulf and Hut 8, the publication reported.
IREN shares rose as much as 4.3% following the report before giving up much of those gains during the US trading session.
The company has not confirmed the report.
The context: Anthropic is racing to secure data centre capacity as it projects substantial profitable growth ahead, according to The Information.
Its search for compute power has brought it to former bitcoin miners such as IREN, which have relatively little experience operating large-scale data centres.
The neocloud has been on the defensive this month after receiving a highly negative review from Silicon Valley research firm SemiAnalysis, which called its Canadian site the worst in the industry.
Chief commercial officer Kent Draper said in a podcast that some of the issues described were a “non-issue” for its future build-outs.
The reported tie-up also comes after Firmus failed to attract public-market support for its IPO, as its plans new data centres for customers including Meta and OpenAI.
The source: The Information