IREN shares rise on unconfirmed report of multiyear Anthropic cloud deal

The Information report and IREN's market reaction

IREN Limited (NASDAQ: IREN) shares rose on Monday after The Information reported that the data-center operator had signed a multiyear cloud-computing deal with Anthropic, citing people familiar with the relationship. The report did not disclose a contract value, term, capacity, GPU configuration or delivery schedule, and neither Anthropic nor IREN has confirmed the agreement.

The stock climbed roughly 9% in Sunday overnight trading to about $38, then traded up about 5% in Monday's premarket session before paring most of the move. By 9:55 a.m. EDT the shares were at $35.53, up 0.95% from Friday's $35.19 close, leaving IREN with a market capitalization of about $14 billion and a year-to-date gain of about 5.65%, well below its 52-week high of $76.87. Other reports pegged the premarket move at about 4% to roughly $36.70–$36.76. Reporting also noted peer TeraWulf, which already holds a confirmed Anthropic lease, slipped about 0.2% while the broader data-center and crypto-mining group held flat.

Why a frontier lab contract would matter for IREN

The report, if confirmed, would fill a disclosure IREN made on August 27, when the company said it had signed a multiyear AI cloud contract with a "leading frontier AI lab" whose name it was "not able to disclose just yet." Co-founder and co-CEO Daniel Roberts said 2026 capacity was "largely sold out" and that the first of four liquid-cooled 50-megawatt GPU deployments had been delivered to Microsoft. The frontier-lab contract was one of several multiyear deals announced in August alongside Cohere, Perplexity and Figure AI.

IREN's existing disclosures put 2026 capacity at $4 billion in contracted annualized run-rate revenue, with operating capacity at about $1 billion of annualized revenue run-rate as of August 26. Recent three-year contracts have been priced above $20 million per megawatt of IT load, with talks near $25 million, and customer prepayments are covering 45% to 55% of GPU costs. Analysts cited in coverage said neocloud contract pricing has moved from roughly $10–$15 per watt to $15–$20 per watt or more. ARR is an operating metric rather than GAAP revenue and remains subject to utilization and acceptance.

Anthropic's broader capacity push

The Information framed the IREN reference inside a larger analysis of Anthropic's data-center economics. The outlet reported that Anthropic has committed to more than 15 gigawatts of capacity across over 10 cloud providers, including Amazon Web Services and Google, with total agreements valued at about $530 billion. Anthropic's computing capacity is expected to rise from 1.4 GW last year to 5 GW this year, 9.5 GW next year and more than 15 GW in 2028, according to the report.

The report also cited an estimate that bringing a separate 245-MW Louisiana facility online one month earlier could generate an additional $1.3 billion in revenue for Anthropic, a figure tied to that site rather than to any IREN contract. Coverage noted that faster site activation and heavier server leasing could pressure margins, and that lower spending from major customers such as Microsoft and Meta could add further pressure.

Open questions on terms, financing and site quality

The Information's report left the central economic details unverified. No dollar value, term length, capacity figure or delivery timetable accompanied the disclosure, and no company confirmation has been issued, so the size and scope of any Anthropic-IREN contract remain unconfirmed. Coverage also flagged that SemiAnalysis said last week it had heard customer complaints about the operational quality of IREN's legacy data centers in Prince George and Mackenzie, British Columbia, which are scheduled for liquid-cooled deployments in 2027.

IREN's reported fiscal 2027 capital spending guidance of $25 billion to $30 billion and a quarterly net loss of $684 million, mostly from non-cash charges tied to retiring mining hardware, were cited as execution and financing risks. Other disclosures point to a $2.8 billion batch of new multiyear AI cloud contracts announced July 20, a weighted average contract term of about four years, and a Microsoft agreement valued at about $9.7 billion covering 200 MW of critical IT load at the Childress, Texas campus, with a 20% prepayment and Nvidia GB300 hardware.

Other developments

Separately on Monday, the UK government said its AI Security Institute will continue pre-release access to frontier models from OpenAI and Anthropic, AI minister Kanishka Narayan said, after a White House hold on the arrangement.