Anthropic Takes 95MW in Cape Breton on a 20-Year Lease

EverWind announced on 16 October 2026 that it has signed a long-term lease for the first phase of a data centre campus at its Point Tupper industrial site on Cape Breton Island, and will spend more than $10 billion in Nova Scotia across the campus and new wind generation. More than $8 billion goes to developing, building, owning and financing the campus, and $2 billion to four onshore wind projects. The company calls it the largest privately funded investment in the province's history.

EverWind's release identifies the tenant only as "a leading frontier AI developer". Anthropic confirmed to Global News that it would lease and run the site, and the Globe and Mail reported on 16 October that the lease runs 20 years and covers an 18,600 square metre building drawing 95 megawatts. Officials declined to disclose its value; chief executive Trent Vichie described the tenant as having "incredibly large balance sheets".

Ninety-five megawatts now, 325 more in 2028

The campus begins with 95 MW in late 2027, followed by a 325 MW expansion targeted for 2028, subject to commercial, technical and regulatory conditions, for 420 MW at full development. The $2 billion wind investment covers four existing projects in EverWind's Nova Scotia portfolio: Bear Lake, Windy Ridge, Kmtnuk and Upper Afton. The release says the work will support around 2,000 construction positions and 215 permanent jobs, and cites projections commissioned from the consultancy Davis Pier putting provincial corporate income tax at about $1.5 billion over the initial 20-year term.

Who pays for the wires

EverWind commits to fully fund all connection, network upgrade and other electricity-system costs attributable to the development, so that they are not passed to existing Nova Scotia customers. The campus includes several hundred megawatt hours of battery storage and is to be designed so it can reduce or stop drawing grid electricity when reliability requires it. The release also states that the expansion will not connect until the required system studies and approvals are complete, placing the 325 MW tranche behind provincial processes that have not yet run.

As Parallax Nexus reported on 13 October, FERC rejected the core of PJM's plan to let data centres join the largest US grid before matching generation existed. EverWind's structure is the inverse answer: bring the generation, the storage and the cheque for the network upgrades, and accept curtailment. Whether that arithmetic holds for 420 MW on a provincial grid of this size is the open question, and nothing published on 16 October settles it.

The lake and the town

Cooling runs on a closed loop of water and glycol, with heat removed primarily by air and water-assisted cooling reserved for the hottest weather. EverWind puts water use at roughly 100,000 litres a day in the first phase and about 500,000 litres a day at full build-out, which it describes as around 1 per cent of Landrie Lake's identified daily safe yield of some 34 million litres. Residents who protested in Port Hawkesbury over the weekend put it differently. Aidan Pottie told Global News that the lake is the town's drinking water source, while holding a sign reading "you can't drink data". Port Hawkesbury sits less than a kilometre from Point Tupper. Organisers have called a province-wide protest for 7 November.

Negotiations are under way with a First Nations consortium led by Membertou Development Corporation for an ownership stake in the campus, subject to agreements not yet completed. EverWind also signed on to the federal government's Responsible Data Centre Development Principles on the day of the announcement. Premier Tim Houston said the opportunity had been under discussion for about a month.

The honest reading is that the lease matters more than the $10 billion. Headline figures for AI campuses are routinely announced and quietly rephased; a signed 20-year commitment from a tenant with Anthropic's balance sheet is what makes the debt financeable. What remains unknown is the price. Neither party disclosed the lease value, the tax and GDP projections are the developer's own commissioned work, and the second phase, 325 of the 420 megawatts, is contingent on studies that have not been done.