“Antropic, cloud contract with Iren”... Speed up securing data centers

The Information, an American IT media outlet, reported on the 11th (local time), citing sources, that Antropic signed a multi-year cloud contract with neocloud company Iren.

The media reported that the size and duration of the contract are unknown.

Antropic is pursuing an initial public offering (IPO) next month.

In addition to Iren, Antropic has signed data center lease contracts worth 15 gigawatts (GW) and 530 billion dollars (about 720 trillion won) with more than 10 cloud companies, including Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google, and is demanding that the companies speed up operation.

Accordingly, Antropic's AI computing capacity is expected to increase from 1.4GW last year to 5GW this year, 9.5GW next year, and more than 15GW in 2028.

The Information analyzed that the reason Antropic is rushing to secure and operate a data center is because the sooner the servers are turned on, the more profits they can make.

According to estimates by investors and analysts, Antropic can generate additional sales of more than $1.3 billion (approximately 1.8 trillion won) by operating the 245 megawatt (MW) data center it leases in Louisiana just one month ahead of schedule.

The assumption is that all of this capacity will be used to generate AI answers (inference).

This data center was developed by Hut 8 and operated by Fluidstack, and will operate Google Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) from the second quarter of next year.

Infrastructure advisory firm Occam Edge estimated that if Antropic spends about $200 million a month to rent chips from the facility, its gross profit margin could reach 85%.

This does not include model training costs and labor costs.

Thanks to this inferred profitability, Antropic went from spending about $2.3 per dollar of sales on operating expenses in the spring of last year to a slight surplus in the second quarter of this year, The Information reported.

Royal Powers Energy, an energy analysis company, analyzed that an AI inference data center can make a profit even if the power price is $5,631 per megawatt hour (MWh). This is more than 100 times the typical wholesale electricity price.

However, The Information pointed out that margins may be lower due to large-scale server rentals this year, large customers such as Microsoft and Metaplatform have reduced spending on Antropic, and competition with Open AI and others is fierce.