Claude is a hungry beast. No, not someone’s croissant-and-cheese devouring boyfriend – well, let us rephrase that, for he might be, given modern people’s artificial romantic proclivities. Rather, Claude is the ‘personification’ of Anthropic AI, which has announced it is building a massive data centre in remote Cape Breton, the vast rugged peninsula of the province of Nova Scotia jutting out into the Atlantic Ocean, famous for its scenic road traversing the coast, offering panoramic views and dizzying heights. I’ve long had a dream of cycling its two hundred or so miles.
EverWind Fuels announced Friday that U.S. AI company Anthropic has signed a 20-year lease for a 18,600-square metre data centre in Point Tupper, N.S., that would draw 95 megawatts of electricity during its first phase.
EverWind officials declined to disclose the value of the lease with the company, which says the site will power its Claude AI assistant and growing Canadian demand. Anthropic, led by CEO Dario Amodei, said in a press release that Canada is the sixth-largest user of Claude worldwide.
The data centre is scheduled to come online late next year. A 325-megawatt expansion is expected in mid-2028, which would bring the development’s total energy demand to 420 megawatts
To put this into context, 420 megawatts is enough instantaneous energy to sustain up to 400,000 households, or up to a million people. The population of Cape Breton, as of 2021, was 132,019. So Claude would, by my back-of-the-napkin calculations, eventually be devouring about four times the energy consumption of the entire population of the peninsula. AI is an energy-and-information sucking black hole, in more ways than one, like some intergalactic space monster gobbling up everything in its path – only this time, it’s real.
As someone wrote to me recently, all of our data will soon be stored in these centres – try buying external ‘memory’ nowadays. Less and less will be on our ‘personal’ computers, which are ever-less ‘personal’ with each iteration. Everything’s ‘in the cloud’, which is a mythical metaphor; for it’s not in the cloud, but very much on the ground, in the wires and cables and chips of these vast, energy-consuming, mysterious warehouses.
Who, pray tell, is running this show, and what’s the end game in all of this?
