Analyst Estimates Anthropic's Louisiana Data Center Could Bring In $1.3 Billion a Month, Set to Go Live in Q2 2027

Since Hut 8 signed a 15-year, $7 billion lease with Fluidstack on Dec. 17, 2025, with Google guaranteeing the deal, the River Bend campus in West Feliciana Parish, Louisiana, has gone from a financing announcement to a construction site. A groundbreaking and first-look event took place in early October 2026. Anthropic's head of compute and Louisiana officials attended, as did Donald Trump Jr.

Now there is a number attached to the schedule. Christian Okoye of infrastructure advisory firm Occam Edge estimates the site could produce about $1.3 billion in monthly revenue for Anthropic. By that estimate, bringing it online one month early would add at least $1.3 billion.

The figure surfaced in an AI infrastructure newsletter from The Information's Ann Davis Vaughan, reported from the Hut 8 kickoff in St. Francisville.

What is being built

Hut 8 is developing the 611-acre campus. Fluidstack leases and operates it. Anthropic supplies the Google TPUs that will run inside.

The first phase delivers 245 MW of usable IT compute, backed by 330 MW of total power. The gap covers cooling and electrical overhead. Entergy Louisiana supplies the power, and operations are scheduled to begin in the second quarter of 2027. Hut 8 is seeking 1 GW at the location.

Hut 8's own lease disclosures: a triple net lease for 245 MW, three 5-year renewal options, a 3.0% annual rent escalator, and a base contract value of $7.0 billion. With every option exercised, that rises to roughly $17.7 billion. Hut 8 projects cumulative net operating income of $6.9 billion, about $454 million a year.

How the estimate works

Okoye's math assumes Anthropic uses the entire 245 MW for inference, which is the work of answering prompts and running models in production. Against roughly $200 million a month in chip-leasing costs, that implies a gross margin near 85%. That margin excludes training costs and operating expenses.

The local numbers are more modest. The first phase of construction is expected to create up to 1,500 jobs. Once running, the facility is projected to support 75 to 100 permanent positions and generate up to $90 million a year in tax revenue for the parish.

The race behind it

Anthropic has signed roughly $530 billion in data-center leasing deals and committed to about 15 GW across more than 10 providers, including AWS and Google. Measured AI projects Anthropic capacity rising from 1.4 GW in 2025 to 5 GW this year, 9.5 GW in 2027 and more than 15 GW in 2028.

The Information also reported, citing people familiar with the matter, an unannounced multiyear cloud deal between Anthropic and IREN. Neither company has confirmed it, and the size, location and term are undisclosed.

Vaughan wrote that the buildout increasingly depends on current and former bitcoin miners holding scarce grid connections, including Hut 8, TeraWulf, IREN and Nscale. Anthropic is also in talks to lease up to 1 GW from Apollo-backed Stream Data Centers, according to The Information.

The Information reported that Anthropic moved from spending about $2.30 in operating costs per $1 of revenue in spring 2025 to a slight profit on that basis in the June 2026 quarter. The IPO is expected next month, per the same reporting. Anthropic has not publicly confirmed a date in anything we have seen.

The caveats

The $1.3 billion is a scenario, not Anthropic's reported revenue. The Information flagged limits on the 85% margin: training costs were projected at more than twice inference costs, and rentals such as SpaceX capacity will push margins down. Microsoft and Meta have cut spending on Claude, and OpenAI and open-source models are competing for the same customers. In The Information's analysis, only Anthropic appears to have this level of pricing power on inference.

That last point is the one investors will test. The calculation holds only if every megawatt is filled with paying inference demand from day one.

Trump family ties are part of the Hut 8 story. The Information noted Hut 8's bitcoin-mining legacy involving Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump. No source ties that history to any contract term, and no investigation or complaint has been announced.

The next hard date is the second quarter of 2027, when the first 245 MW is due to come online. Whether Hut 8 and Fluidstack can hit it, and whether Anthropic's IPO filing puts real revenue figures next to the analysts' estimates, are the open questions.