Anthropic has unannounced multiyear cloud deal with IREN: The Information - Blockspace
Anthropic has an unannounced, multiyear cloud deal with IREN (NASDAQ: IREN), The Information reported on Sunday, citing people familiar with the relationship. The report gave no contract value, term beyond multiyear, capacity, GPU configuration or delivery schedule. Neither company has confirmed the agreement.
IREN shares rose about 5% in premarket trading Monday before giving back most of the move. At 9:55 a.m. EDT the stock traded at $35.53, up 0.95% from a $35.19 close, for a market cap of about $14 billion. That leaves IREN up 5.65% this year, well off its 52-week high of $76.87, according to Yahoo Finance figures.
The Information’s report came in a broader piece on the economics of Anthropic’s push to bring data-center capacity online sooner.
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The report’s headline example puts a price on speed. By its estimate, bringing one signed site’s “245 MW of usable capacity online one month early would add [over] $1.3 billion in revenue.” The Information did not identify that site as IREN’s, so the figure describes Anthropic’s incentive to move fast rather than the economics of any IREN contract.
An unnamed frontier lab
IREN has already told investors it serves a frontier lab. In its fiscal 2026 results on August 27, the company said it had signed a multiyear AI cloud contract with a “leading frontier AI lab,” without naming the customer. The Information’s report fits that description, but neither company has said the two refer to the same agreement.
IREN reported $4 billion in contracted annualized run-rate revenue for 2026 capacity, against about $1 billion of operating ARR as of August 26. ARR is a company operating metric, not GAAP revenue. The metric relies on utilization and pricing assumptions, and realization also depends on customers’ acceptance after testing and commissioning.
“Our 2026 capacity is largely sold out. This includes Horizon 1, the first of four leading-edge liquid cooled GPU deployments that we successfully delivered to Microsoft this month,” co-founder and co-CEO Daniel Roberts said with the results.
That followed IREN’s July 20 announcement of $2.8 billion in new multiyear AI cloud contracts. The company raised its 2026 ARR target above $4 billion, with roughly 85% under contract at the time. One counterparty was described only as a “new leading AI developer,” and IREN put the weighted average term across its customer contracts at about four years.
Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) remains the anchor customer. Its five-year agreement, valued at about $9.7 billion, covers 200 MW of critical IT load across four liquid-cooled GPU deployments at IREN’s Childress, Texas campus, including a 20% prepayment.
The funding bill
IREN’s fiscal year ended June 30 with $707 million in revenue, up 41% from $501 million. The company swung to a $702.6 million net loss from $86.9 million of net income, driven largely by non-cash impairments tied to decommissioning mining hardware. AI Cloud revenue rose to $128.8 million from $16.4 million, and in the June quarter AI Cloud revenue of $70.5 million topped bitcoin-mining revenue of $66.7 million.
IREN forecasts fiscal 2027 capex of $25 billion to $30 billion. Roberts has pushed back on reading that as an equity need: “The $25-30bn of forecasted FY27 capex isn’t an equity number. Customer prepayments can cover about half the GPU capex. Lenders can fund most of the rest.”
At June 30, IREN held $5.9 billion in cash and cash equivalents and $1.72 billion in restricted cash, against $7.59 billion in total debt. Its next earnings report is expected around November 5.
Anthropic’s other operator deals
An IREN contract would add to a string of Anthropic compute deals touching former bitcoin miners, each structured differently. A reported $35 billion agreement links Anthropic to Lambda’s capacity at Hut 8’s (NASDAQ: HUT) Beacon Point campus in Texas. That arrangement runs through Nvidia and Lambda and is not a direct Anthropic lease with Hut 8.
In Norway, Bloomberg reported a six-year, $10 billion compute agreement between Anthropic and Volta using Bitdeer’s (NASDAQ: BTDR) Tydal data center, which has 121 MW of critical IT capacity. Bitdeer’s own exposure is a separate 16-year infrastructure lease with Volta carrying about $4.7 billion in scheduled payments over its initial term.
Bloomberg also reported a six-year, $45 billion Anthropic commitment with Nscale covering about 460 MW at its Monarch development in West Virginia. Systems there are expected to begin coming online in late 2027.
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TeraWulf (NASDAQ: WULF) has the most direct arrangement in the group: a 20-year Anthropic lease for about 401 MW of critical IT load in Kentucky, worth about $19 billion over the initial term. A confirmed IREN deal would be a different model, a cloud contract on IREN-owned GPUs rather than a lease of powered shell.