Anthropic has signed a 20-year lease for its first data centre in Canada, securing capacity at a planned campus in Point Tupper, Nova Scotia, on Cape Breton Island. The facility will be built, owned and financed by EverWind Fuels, the Canadian green energy developer behind the site, which says the broader project represents more than C$10 billion (about US$7.1 billion) in investment — the largest privately funded project in the province's history.
The campus is planned in two phases. The first, rated at 95 megawatts, is targeted to come online by late 2027. A 325-megawatt expansion is slated for 2028, subject to regulatory approvals, bringing the site to 420 MW at full build-out — roughly the continuous power draw of a mid-sized city. EverWind plans to raise about C$8 billion for the data centre itself and C$2 billion for four onshore wind farms intended to supply it, and says it will cover all grid-upgrade costs so they are not passed on to provincial ratepayers.
The project is expected to create about 2,000 construction jobs and 215 permanent positions, with permanent roles paying between C$135,000 and C$185,000 a year, and to generate more than C$400 million in municipal tax revenue over its life. A consortium of Mi'kmaw communities led by Membertou Development Corporation is negotiating a nine percent equity stake. Cooling will use a closed-loop water-glycol system, with water drawn from nearby Landrie Lake at a projected 100,000 litres a day in phase one, rising to about 500,000 litres a day at full size — a fraction of the 34 million litres daily the provincial regulator has approved for withdrawal.
Anthropic's head of public policy for Canada, Jacob Glick, said the company wants its infrastructure closer to the people who rely on it, noting that Canadians use Claude at one of the highest per-capita levels in the world, second only to the United States. Nova Scotia Premier Tim Houston spoke at the announcement. The site pairs abundant wind power with a cool North Atlantic climate that eases cooling loads, and sits near subsea cable routes linking North America to Europe.
The lease lands amid intensifying scrutiny of data centre power and water use. The Ecology Action Centre has urged thorough impact assessments, provincial New Democrats have called for stronger safeguards, and on the same day the deal was disclosed, San Francisco's mayor signed a 45-day pause on new data centre construction in that city. EverWind has signed onto Ottawa's non-binding responsible data centre development principles and says the campus can curtail grid draw when supply is tight.
The economics behind the deal are stark: Anthropic spent $7.33 billion on computing and infrastructure last year, roughly triple its 2024 figure, and the company is reportedly preparing for a US IPO that could value it at more than $2 trillion. New York City Comptroller Mark Levine has urged the company to delay the offering over safety and governance concerns.
The move signals where frontier-lab compute is physically anchored. As power, not capital, becomes the binding constraint on AI expansion, labs are looking beyond the United States for jurisdictions with surplus renewable generation and relative regulatory stability. For Nova Scotia, the bet is that hosting frontier AI infrastructure pays off in jobs and tax base; for Anthropic, it is an early hedge against the grid bottlenecks and local opposition now shadowing every large data centre proposal south of the border.
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