Anthropic leases 20 years of Nova Scotia power for 420MW

Anthropic signed a 20-year lease with EverWind Fuels for the first phase of a campus at Point Tupper, Nova Scotia, its first Canadian data center, drawing 95MW from late 2027 and rising to a planned 420MW by 2028, The Globe and Mail reported. The same day, San Francisco mayor Daniel Lurie signed a 45-day citywide moratorium on new and expanded data center approvals, The San Francisco Standard reported. Anthropic is headquartered in San Francisco.

Those three facts arrived within a day of each other, and the ledger does not have to editorialize to join them.

The lease is a power contract wearing a real estate name

Read the Nova Scotia numbers in the order they arrive: 95MW from late 2027, a planned 420MW by 2028. The first phase is not the commitment. The ramp is, and it is more than four times the opening draw inside a year. The counterparty tells you the rest. EverWind Fuels is in the business of generating power, not leasing floor space, and the term is 20 years. What gets locked up at that length is electricity, and the campus is the thing built around it.

That is a different procurement question from the one data centers used to answer. Land, fiber and tax treatment are all portable. Hundreds of megawatts under contract for two decades are not, and a company willing to put its first Canadian site at Point Tupper for them is saying the grid drew the map.

San Francisco set a clock, not a pause

The moratorium reads short and is not. It runs 45 days, it was authored by Supervisor Shamann Walton, it passed the Board of Supervisors unanimously, and it directs the Planning Department to report back within 25 days. It also leaves room for an extension to 22 months.

The 45 days change nothing about anyone's siting decision. The 22-month option changes a good deal, because 22 months is longer than the time between now and the late 2027 start of that 95MW draw in Nova Scotia. A developer reading the ordinance is not being told to wait out a review. It is being told the review may set the schedule. That it passed unanimously, in the home city of much of the industry it regulates, is the part worth keeping.

What the record already says about scale

Capital is not the scarce input here. Anthropic closed its Series H at a $965B post-money valuation on a $47B revenue run-rate as of May 2026, Anthropic said at the time. A company on those numbers is not going to Nova Scotia to save money on a building. It is going because power under long contract and permission to build are the two things money does not produce on its own, and this week only one of the two jurisdictions in this post was offering either.

The demand side did not take a pause

Two open-weight releases landed in the same two days, both in the 500B class. DeepSeek released V4.1-Flash-1017, a sparse mixture-of-experts update with 552B total parameters and a 1M token context window, and opened its search and fetch APIs to all users, Investing.com reported. Reflection AI published the weights for Beam, 501B parameters with 23B active per token, under Apache 2.0, and reported 80.9 on SWE-bench Verified and 80.1 on Terminal Bench v2.1, Reflection said.

Neither release came from Anthropic, and neither needs its campus. What they show is the size of the thing the megawatts are for: 552B parameters here, 501B there, two days apart, both free to download. Compute gets contracted in 20-year increments and models ship in 48-hour ones. This week the slow end of that trade moved to Point Tupper, and San Francisco gave itself 25 days to write a report about it.