Anthropic negotiating lease for new hyperscale data centre near Edmonton

Anthropic is negotiating with Calgary-based Beacon Data Centers Inc. to become the tenant of a proposed hyperscale data centre campus in Sturgeon County, northeast of Edmonton, two sources said. The project, outlined in documents submitted to Alberta’s Utilities Commission, will feature four data halls for artificial-intelligence and high-performance computing workloads and will be supplied by a 920-megawatt natural-gas-fired power plant approved by the commission in October. Construction of the plant is slated to start in the fourth quarter of 2026, with the facility expected to be operational by the fourth quarter of 2027.

The Beacon campus would have roughly double the power capacity of Anthropic’s earlier announced data centre in Point Tupper, Nova Scotia, which is being built by EverWind Fuels under a 20-year lease. That Nova Scotia project is planned in two phases, with an initial 95-MW phase expected to start up in late 2027 and a second 325-MW phase in 2028, for a total of 420 MW.

Anthropic said the new Canadian sites will support its AI model Claude, noting that Canada ranks sixth globally in usage of Claude.ai. The company, which is preparing for a New York Stock Exchange debut in mid-November, has pledged to spend between US$525 billion and US$567 billion on future compute and infrastructure in its SEC filing.