IREN Limited shares gave back an early Monday advance on October 12 after a report linked the AI cloud provider to an undisclosed multiyear agreement with Anthropic, a deal that neither company has confirmed. The retreat came even as IREN's existing Microsoft contract and Nvidia partnership continue to underpin its expansion into AI cloud infrastructure.

The Information reported that Anthropic, the developer of the Claude chatbot, had arranged cloud capacity with IREN. Neither IREN nor Anthropic has publicly confirmed the agreement, and the reported deal's value, computing capacity, and delivery schedule all remain undisclosed.

Early Gains Fade in Afternoon Trading

The stock had climbed 3.67% before the opening bell and opened around $36.31. It touched a session high of $36.69 before retreating toward $35. By around 3:30 p.m. EDT, shares traded near $34.90–$35.03, down approximately 0.5%–1% on the day and slightly below Friday's closing price of $35.19. Trading volume exceeded 40 million shares by midafternoon.

No separate company announcement emerged during Monday's final trading hours to explain the reversal. IREN had already lost ground over the previous week, falling from $41.28 on October 6 to $35.19 on October 9.

Other AI infrastructure names have also drawn uneven market responses. On October 7, CoreWeave's planned data center expansion in India, in which the company outlined 240 megawatts of capacity in Navi Mumbai, was accompanied by a decline in its share price.

August Disclosure Left Customer Unnamed

The reported deal arrives with an open question tied to IREN's own disclosures. In its August 27 results, the company announced a multiyear contract with a “leading frontier AI lab” but withheld that customer's name, while separately identifying Cohere, Perplexity, and other clients. IREN has not established whether Anthropic matches the customer named in that August announcement. Any company statement naming that customer, or addressing the reported Anthropic terms, would amount to the first direct disclosure resolving either question.

The Information also described Anthropic's reliance on data center operators with bitcoin-mining backgrounds, including Hut 8 and TeraWulf. In a separate development, Bitdeer's AI cloud expansion in Malaysia added another example of miners pursuing commercial computing infrastructure.

Bloomberg reported that Anthropic plans to meet potential IPO investors on October 14, two days after the capacity report surfaced.

Cloud Expansion Continues Across the Industry

IREN already holds a $9.7 billion, five-year cloud contract with Microsoft, and its partnership with Nvidia targets up to five gigawatts of AI infrastructure over time. The company has redirected parts of its power infrastructure from bitcoin mining toward higher-density commercial computing operations. Taken together with the mining-background operators cited in The Information's reporting and Bitdeer's Malaysian build-out, IREN's redirection appears as one instance of a broader repositioning of mining-rooted data center operators toward commercial computing capacity.

Major cloud providers are also developing their own chips. A recent report covered Microsoft's Azure Maia 300 expansion, which aims to lower AI computing costs through a planned rollout in 2027.

IREN reported $4 billion in contracted annualized revenue for its 2026 capacity in August. Without confirmation of the Anthropic deal, public disclosures do not establish whether the reported business would add revenue beyond the company's existing contracts.