Key points
- What The Information reported about Anthropic
- The unnamed AI lab IREN disclosed in August
- The selloff before the report
IREN Ltd (IREN) rose in early trading on October 12 after The Information reported that Anthropic has a multiyear cloud deal with the company that hadn't been announced. The shares were at $36.03 at 9:31 a.m. ET, up 2.4% from Friday's close of $35.19.
"People familiar with the relationship say Anthropic also has an unannounced multiyear cloud deal with IREN," The Information wrote in a report on Anthropic's data center leases published October 11.
IREN signed an unnamed frontier AI lab in August
IREN said on August 27 that it had signed a new multi-year AI cloud contract with a leading frontier AI lab, but its disclosure didn't identify the lab. It's not clear whether the deal The Information reported is the same contract.
In the same update, IREN said it had $4 billion of contracted annualized run-rate revenue for its 2026 capacity, which it described as largely sold out. Contracted annualized run-rate revenue expresses the contracts on an annual basis; it isn't revenue IREN has already recognized. Microsoft (MSFT) is IREN's largest disclosed customer, under a five-year deal worth about $9.7 billion.
Anthropic's push to add computing capacity "increasingly depends on current and former bitcoin miners such as Hut 8, TeraWulf, IREN and Nscale," The Information said. We reported in August that Anthropic's $35 billion deal with Lambda runs through a Hut 8 campus in Texas.
The stock was coming off a rough week
IREN had been falling before the report. It dropped 6.3% on October 7, when research firm SemiAnalysis criticized IREN's British Columbia data centers, calling one of them the worst site in the industry, citing user accounts. SemiAnalysis said IREN's newer Texas builds look much better.
