HALIFAX, Nova Scotia, October 17 — Anthropic, the U.S. artificial-intelligence company behind the Claude assistant, has signed a 20-year lease for its first Canadian data centre — a C$10-billion (US$7.1 billion) campus in Point Tupper, Nova Scotia that developer EverWind says is the largest private investment in the province’s history. The deal signals that frontier AI labs are increasingly anchoring compute infrastructure outside the United States.
Under the agreement, EverWind Fuels will build, own and finance the campus on Cape Breton Island; Anthropic will lease the first phase for at least two decades. Phase one, with 95 megawatts of capacity, is targeted to come online by late 2027, followed by a 325 MW expansion in 2028 for a total of 420 MW. EverWind plans to fund C$8 billion of construction and C$2 billion in onshore wind farms, and says it will cover all grid-upgrade costs so they are not passed to provincial ratepayers.
The location reflects a deliberate calculus. Nova Scotia offers abundant wind power, a cool North Atlantic climate that eases server cooling, and subsea cable routes linking North America to Europe. Canada’s relative regulatory stability and existing hydroelectric surplus have made it an attractive jurisdiction as hyperscalers diversify beyond U.S. borders to reduce single-jurisdiction risk.
The move comes as AI infrastructure financing reaches sovereign scale. Analysts estimate that technology giants are on track to surpass the U.S. government as the largest net issuers of long-term debt by 2027, with bond sales funding compute buildouts. The binding constraint has shifted from capital or permits to power: new capacity is increasingly gated by access to stable, low-cost electricity rather than construction timelines.
For Nova Scotia, the project promises about 2,000 construction jobs and 215 permanent positions, with permanent roles paying C$135,000–C$185,000 a year. But data centres have become a flashpoint across Canada over their heavy draws on power and water. EverWind has pledged a closed-loop cooling system and says the campus can curtail grid draw when supply is tight, though provincial New Democrats have urged stronger safeguards.
Anthropic’s Canadian head of public policy, 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 levels globally per capita — second only to the United States. The lease marks a structural step in where the world’s frontier AI compute is physically anchored.