Anthropic's first Canadian lease is for 95 megawatts

Anthropic has signed a 20-year lease for an 18,600-square-metre data centre at Point Tupper, Nova Scotia, EverWind Fuels announced on Friday, the Canadian Press reported. The first phase would draw 95 megawatts. It is Anthropic's first data centre agreement in Canada, a company executive told Reuters. EverWind officials declined to disclose the value of the lease.

Anthropic's announcement identified the previously unnamed tenant for the first phase, The Logic reported, and the company said the facility will power its Claude models and serve Canadian and global customers. The Logic noted that Anthropic typically buys computing from large cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services and Google; here it will lease space directly from the owner. The first phase is scheduled to open in late 2027, and a 325-megawatt expansion is expected in mid-2028, which EverWind said would bring total demand to 420 megawatts. By our arithmetic the two figures do sum to 420. Anthropic said in a press release that Canada is the sixth-largest user of Claude worldwide, according to the Canadian Press.

EverWind put the overall plan at more than C$10bn, according to Reuters, and called it the largest privately funded investment in the province's history. The Canadian Press and The Logic both reported EverWind's split: about C$8bn for the data centre campus, which The Logic gave as more than C$8bn, and C$2bn for onshore wind projects. EverWind said the project would create 2,000 construction jobs and 215 permanent positions paying C$135,000 to C$185,000 a year. It plans to fund the build with its own capital and, with the lease signed, will seek financing from banks and pension plans.

Power is the first open question. EverWind's wind farms will not be ready when the data centre opens, the Canadian Press and The Logic reported, so the first phase will rely on existing infrastructure. EverWind officials said the province's independent grid operator had produced a study finding that the existing system can support the load; we have not seen the study. EverWind said it would pay the full cost of connections and network upgrades so they are not passed to existing ratepayers, and plans about 200 megawatt-hours of battery storage on site. Anthropic, per The Logic, promised to pay for the grid upgrades and protect existing customers from related price increases. EverWind said it holds environmental approvals for four mainland wind farms with 650 megawatts of capacity, 51 per cent owned by a First Nations consortium led by Membertou First Nation. These are the companies' own descriptions.

Water is the second. EverWind said cooling water would come from nearby Landrie Lake through a closed-loop system, averaging about 100,000 litres a day in the first phase, which it likened to a large shopping mall, and 500,000 litres a day after the expansion. The Canadian Press reported the larger figure as about 1 per cent of the lake's safe daily yield of 34m litres, citing EverWind. By our arithmetic it is nearer 1.5 per cent, and the first-phase draw about 0.3 per cent. The figures are EverWind's, and we have read no independent assessment of them.

Jacob Glick, Anthropic's head of public policy for Canada, said the company would protect ratepayers and water resources while ensuring local communities benefit, Reuters reported. "Canadians are using Claude in growing numbers, and we want our infrastructure to be closer to the people who rely on it," Glick said in a statement quoted by The Logic. Anthropic also said it would contribute "tens of millions of dollars to support community priorities", according to The Logic. Reuters said Anthropic spent $7.33bn on computing and infrastructure last year, a threefold increase on 2024.

The provincial opposition was not persuaded. "The Houston government is supporting this project without any discussion, consultation, legislation or regulations," said Claudia Chender, leader of the Nova Scotia NDP. "The premier is saying people should just trust his word that Nova Scotians will be protected." Premier Tim Houston called the project a major vote of confidence in the rural area and said his government does not plan to legislate new data centre rules, pointing instead to existing environmental and industrial approval processes, the Canadian Press reported. EverWind said it is negotiating with Membertou Development Corporation over a 9 per cent equity stake in the data centre project.

The project lands in a divided Canadian market. The Canadian Press listed BCE's planned 1.2-gigawatt site near Regina and Meta's $13bn one-gigawatt campus north of Edmonton, against a Manitoba project rejected by the premier, an Alberta gas plant denied by the regulator and one-year moratoriums in Oakville and Mississauga. The same tension between demand and local power runs through our reporting on power constraints and on permitting as industrial policy. For Anthropic, it is a first step from renting cloud capacity towards leasing buildings of its own.