IREN shares jumped on a report of a multi-year cloud deal with Anthropic.

The Nasdaq-listed IREN saw its shares rise more than 4% after The Information reported that the company had struck an unannounced deal with Anthropic.

According to unnamed sources familiar with the relationship, the frontier AI lab and the Sydney-based neocloud have entered into a multi-year cloud agreement. The publication reported that Anthropic's ability to win the compute race against OpenAI may depend on former bitcoin miners such as IREN, Nscale, TeraWulf and Hut 8.

IREN shares rose as much as 4.3% following the report before giving up much of those gains during the US trading session. The company has not confirmed the report.

Anthropic is racing to secure data centre capacity as it projects substantial profitable growth ahead, according to The Information. Its search for compute power has led it to former bitcoin miners such as IREN, which have relatively little experience operating large-scale data centres.

IREN has been on the defensive this month after receiving a highly negative review from Silicon Valley research firm SemiAnalysis, which called its Canadian site the worst in the industry. Chief commercial officer Kent Draper said in a podcast that some of the issues described were a "non-issue" for its future build-outs.

The reported tie-up also comes after Firmus failed to attract public-market support for its IPO, as it plans new data centres for customers including Meta and OpenAI.