The Attractive Economics Behind Anthropic Data Center Sprint

Ann Davis Vaughan reports from Hut 8's St. Francisville, Louisiana kickoff that Anthropic is racing partners to switch on capacity against an IPO expected next month. Anthropic has signed about $530B of data-center leasing deals and committed to renting or leasing roughly 15 GW from AWS, Google, SpaceXAI and more than a dozen other providers; people familiar say it also has an unannounced multiyear cloud deal with publicly traded IREN. Measured AI projects Anthropic capacity from 1.4 GW in 2025 to 5 GW this year, 9.5 GW in 2027 and 15+ GW in 2028 (Microsoft Azure was ~5 GW end-2023 for all customers). The Louisiana site: Hut 8 develops, Fluidstack leases/operates, Anthropic supplies Google TPU chips; 330 MW power for 245 MW usable compute from Q2 2027, with Hut 8 seeking 1 GW. Hut 8 retains a bitcoin-mining legacy with Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump. Partners such as Hut 8, TeraWulf, IREN and Nscale hold scarce grid rights; Apollo-backed Stream Data Centers bought Plug Power hydrogen sites and Anthropic is in talks to lease up to 1 GW from Stream. Analyst Christian Okoye (Occam Edge) estimates ~$1.3B monthly revenue potential on that quarter-GW if used for inference, vs ~$200M/month chip lease cost—implying ~85% gross margin before training and opex; one month earlier online could add ~$1.3B revenue. Anthropic went from ~$2.30 opex per $1 revenue in spring 2025 to a slight profit on that basis in the June 2026 quarter. Caveats: training costs were projected at more than 2x inference; SpaceX and other rentals will depress margins; Microsoft and Meta have cut Claude spend; OpenAI and open-source competition; only Anthropic appears to have this inference pricing power.