Artificial intelligence giant Anthropic has signed a long-term lease for the space and power to run its AI models at EverWind’s planned data centre in Cape Breton, N.S. 

The San Francisco-based company said Friday that the facility in Point Tupper will power its Claude models and serve Canadian and global customers. Its announcement identifies the previously unnamed tenant for the first phase of EverWind’s development on the site.

The Logic reported in August that Anthropic was hiring Canadian staff, including people to find and lease data centre sites and secure electricity. A posting for a new compute country lead described plans to bring “gigawatts of compute online in Canada,” while another sought a community engagement manager in Alberta.

EverWind said the data-centre campus will involve more than $8 billion in private investment and $2 billion to build onshore wind projects, calling the combined development Nova Scotia’s largest ever private investment. The initial 95-megawatt facility is targeted to open in late 2027, while a potential expansion could bring capacity to 420 megawatts in 2028. Anthropic’s lease is for 20 years.

“Canadians are using Claude in growing numbers, and we want our infrastructure to be closer to the people who rely on it,” Jacob Glick, Anthropic’s head of Canada public policy, said in a statement. “The people of Nova Scotia should benefit from what gets built in their community, and we will work together to achieve shared goals and earn our place as a good neighbour.”

Anthropic typically buys compute from large cloud providers, such as Amazon Web Services and Google. In Nova Scotia, it will lease space directly from the data-centre owner and energy provider. Other big U.S. AI developers have expressed interest in Canadian computing infrastructure, including OpenAI and Meta, which announced in July plans to spend $13 billion on a one-gigawatt data centre in Sturgeon County, Alta.

Anthropic promised to pay for grid upgrades required to connect the Point Tupper facility, protect existing electricity customers from related price increases and contribute “tens of millions of dollars to support community priorities.”

EverWind’s planned wind farms won’t be ready when the data centre opens, meaning it will initially rely on existing electricity infrastructure. Provincial NDP Leader Claudia Chender, however, questioned how the government would enforce those assurances and criticized it for backing the project without consulting the public. 

In a statement Friday morning, EverWind said the campus will complement its planned green hydrogen and ammonia development. A First Nation consortium led by Membertou Development Corporation is negotiating an ownership stake in the data-centre campus.