IREN Limited (IREN) jumped 5% in premarket trading on Monday. The move followed a report from The Information that the company has signed a multi-year AI cloud services deal with Anthropic.

Overnight trading on Sunday looked even stronger, with Stocktwits reporting a gain of about 8% late Sunday after the news first broke.

Neither IREN nor Anthropic has commented on the report, and the deal remains unannounced.

Word of the reported agreement circulated quickly on social media over the weekend, with market commentators highlighting the connection to IREN's August disclosure. A post from market news account Wall St Engine on X on October 12, 2026 read:

Anthropic has reportedly signed a multiyear cloud deal with $IREN , according to The Information. IREN disclosed a contract with an unnamed "leading frontier AI lab" in August. The report suggests Anthropic could be that customer, although IREN has not confirmed the connection. pic.twitter.com/Ec5IyK07lH

— Wall St Engine (@wallstengine) October 12, 2026

(Wall St Engine on X)

According to The Information, people familiar with the relationship described the agreement between the two companies. The report did not give a dollar value or a start date.

The Mystery Customer Gets Name

Investors had been speculating for weeks about the identity of one IREN customer whose name had been withheld. On the company's fiscal fourth-quarter earnings call in August, CEO Daniel Roberts discussed a series of new multi-year cloud contracts. He named Cohere, Prometheus, Perplexity, Figure AI, Fal AI and Higgsfield AI as counterparties, and also referenced "a leading frontier AI lab whose name we're not able to disclose just yet."

The new report points to Anthropic as that undisclosed customer, although the connection has not been confirmed by either company.

The Information's report also examined the economics of Anthropic's data center leases. It said the AI lab is pushing its cloud partners to build new sites at a faster pace. Anthropic already relies on large providers such as Amazon and Google, and the report said adding IREN would let it lock in large clusters of GPUs with more flexibility and at lower cost.

Anthropic's push for additional computing capacity has increasingly come to depend on current and former bitcoin miners, and the report specifically named Hut 8, TeraWulf, IREN and Nscale as firms the AI lab is turning to. For IREN, a confirmed deal would fall under the company's newer AI cloud business, which it operates alongside its legacy bitcoin-mining sites.

The report also tied the deal to Anthropic's planned initial public offering. It said access to computing power helps keep growth on track both before and after the listing. Renting capacity from firms that own their own power supply and data centers can also hold down research and operating costs, and the report noted that buyers of Anthropic stock would focus on its losses and its gross margin — two areas where cheaper computing could help.

Questions Over Legacy Sites

The premarket rally comes after a rough week for the stock. IREN came under pressure after research firm SemiAnalysis raised concerns about the quality of the company's older data centers in British Columbia. IREN operates a portfolio that includes these legacy bitcoin-mining sites as well as a newer AI cloud buildout.

In posts on X on Wednesday, SemiAnalysis said it had heard from multiple customers and end users about the Prince George and Mackenzie sites. Users described one of them as the "#1 worst site in the industry." IREN has not been reported to have responded to those posts in the sources reviewed here. The criticism is aimed at the legacy sites, not at the company's newer AI cloud infrastructure.

Confirmation of the reported deal, or a company response to the site-quality concerns, would each represent the next clear development in the story.

Before Monday's premarket move, IREN stock was down 1.46% in its most recent regular session, according to data shown on Investing.com.

This article originally appeared on CoinCentral.