Anthropic has signed about $530B of data-centre leases, and the inference maths explains the rush
What's the deal? Anthropic has signed about $530B of data-centre leasing deals and committed to rent or lease roughly 15 GW of capacity from AWS, Google, SpaceXAI and more than a dozen other providers, The Information reports from Hut 8's site kickoff in St. Francisville, Louisiana. The rush comes ahead of an IPO the outlet says is expected next month.
The Louisiana template: Hut 8 develops the site, Fluidstack leases and operates it, and Anthropic supplies the Google TPU chips. The campus is planned at 330 MW of power for 245 MW of usable compute from Q2 2027, and Hut 8 is seeking up to 1 GW there. Former bitcoin miners such as Hut 8, TeraWulf and IREN, plus Nscale, hold scarce grid connections, which is why they have become Anthropic partners.
What's reported, not confirmed: People familiar told The Information that Anthropic also has an unannounced multiyear cloud deal with IREN, and that it is in talks to lease up to 1 GW from Apollo-backed Stream Data CentersDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, which bought former Plug Power hydrogen sites. Measured AI projects Anthropic's capacity rising from 1.4 GW in 2025 to 5 GW this year, 9.5 GW in 2027 and more than 15 GW in 2028. For scale, Microsoft Azure had about 5 GW for all customers at the end of 2023.
Why the sprint? Analyst Christian Okoye of Occam Edge estimates that a quarter-gigawatt like the Louisiana site could generate about $1.3B of revenue a month if used for inference, against roughly $200M a month in chip lease costs. That implies around 85% gross margin before training and operating costs, and means bringing a site online even a month earlier is worth about $1.3B. The Information adds that Anthropic went from about $2.30 of operating costs per $1 of revenue in spring 2025 to a slight profit on that basis in the June 2026 quarter.
The caveats: These are an outside analyst's estimates, not company figures. Training costs were projected at more than twice inference costs, rentals from SpaceX and others will weigh on margins, Microsoft and Meta have both cut internal Claude spending, and competition from OpenAI and open-source models could erode the pricing power that makes the maths work.
Read more: theinformation.com
