Anthropic has signed a 20-year lease for its first data centre in Canada, taking space in a proposed campus at Point Tupper in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. The developer, a local clean-energy firm called EverWind, announced the deal on 16 October alongside plans it values at more than 10 billion Canadian dollars, which it describes as the largest private investment in the province's history.
What is actually being built
The lease covers an initial 95-megawatt facility, which EverWind expects to bring online late in 2027. A second phase of 325 megawatts is planned for 2028, subject to commercial, technical and regulatory sign-off, which would take the full site to 420 megawatts. The headline investment figure, about 8 billion dollars for the campus and another 2 billion for wind, is a development plan rather than money spent, and it is EverWind's commitment, not a direct outlay by Anthropic. Neither company disclosed what the lease is worth. The project is expected to support around 2,000 construction jobs and 215 permanent roles.
The wind is the whole point, and the catch
EverWind's pitch is clean power. The company is pressing ahead with green hydrogen and ammonia plans at Point Tupper and casts the data centre as a natural fit for the same wind resource. There is a timing problem, though. Company officials acknowledge that the associated wind farms will not be ready when the first phase opens, and say a grid operator study found the existing network could carry that initial load in the meantime.
That raises the obvious worry, given how the AI buildout has been pushing up power prices elsewhere. Both companies have tried to get ahead of it: EverWind says it will cover the electricity infrastructure costs directly tied to the project, and Anthropic has pledged to shield local ratepayers from the bill. Whether those promises hold through a decade of construction is the kind of thing that only becomes clear after the fact, and it is exactly the tension now showing up on power bills in grids that host big computing loads.
For Anthropic, the lease is another large, long-dated bet on infrastructure, following the tens of billions in debt and chip commitments it has lined up this autumn. Powering those commitments with wind off the Nova Scotia coast is a cleaner story than most. The turbines just have to turn up.
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