Energy infrastructure company Hut 8 struck a partnership with Anthropic and Fluidstack to build a data centre to accelerate the deployment of AI infrastructure across the US.

The collaboration aims to deliver at least 245 megawatts and potentially up to 2,295 megawatts of AI data centre capacity for Anthropic by utilising high-performance clusters managed by Fluidstack.

Hut 8 inked a 15-year, $7 billion lease with Fluidstack for the initial 245-megawatt facility in the US state of Louisiana. Google is providing the financial backing, which covers lease payments and related pass-through obligations.

The partnership is across three tranches. In the first, Hut 8 and Fluidstack will develop an initial 245 megawatts of IT capacity, supported by 330 megawatts of utility capacity.

In the second, Hut 8 stated it could increase the computing capacity by an additional 1,000 megawatts.

In the third tranche, Anthropic and Hut 8 could develop up to 1,050 megawatts of additional capacity at the latter’s other US sites.

The companies stated the partnership is notable for its scale, phased approach and the alignment of power, digital infrastructure and compute resources to support energy-intensive AI models. 

In November, Anthropic revealed a plan to spend $50 billion on the buildout of custom data centres across the US to better compete against AI rivals Meta Platforms, OpenAI, Microsoft and Google.