What is the Anthropic SunCable deal?

There is no confirmed deal. The Australian reported on 15 June 2026 that Anthropic is in advanced talks with SunCable, the Northern Territory solar and storage developer majority owned by Mike Cannon-Brookes. The reported subject is power supply for Anthropic's Australian data centre ambitions. No capacity figure, dollar value or signed agreement has been made public, and neither company has publicly confirmed the talks, so the accurate description is advanced talks rather than a transaction. Anthropic is the second hyperscale name linked to the site after Google was reported in advanced discussions in December 2025.

Who owns SunCable and what is the Australia-Asia PowerLink?

SunCable is majority owned by Atlassian co-founder Mike Cannon-Brookes and led by chief executive Ryan Willemsen-Bell. Its flagship Australia-Asia PowerLink project is a large-scale solar and battery development at Powell Creek in the Northern Territory's Barkly region, holding environmental approval for solar generation and a transmission line to Darwin. The project was first conceived to export power to Singapore, and in September 2025 SunCable reset its first priority to supplying Northern Territory customers, data centres among them.

Why would Anthropic build in the Northern Territory?

The Northern Territory offers abundant low-cost solar power, land at scale, and the ability to build generation next to the load rather than waiting in the grid connection queue that constrains data centre power in New South Wales and Victoria. The remoteness that makes the Barkly a poor fit for low-latency services points to large-scale model training, which is latency-tolerant and power-hungry, though neither company has confirmed what the site would run. For a frontier lab whose Australian demand is for compute capacity, cheap firmed renewable power is the draw.

Anthropic in talks with SunCable for Northern Territory solar to power its data centres

At a glance

The Australian reported on 15 June 2026 that Anthropic is in advanced talks with SunCable, the Northern Territory solar and storage developer majority owned by Atlassian co-founder Mike Cannon-Brookes, on a project it valued at roughly A$40 billion.
SunCable's Australia-Asia PowerLink project at Powell Creek in the Barkly region holds environmental approval for large-scale solar generation and a transmission line to Darwin, with a final investment decision targeted for the end of 2027.
The talks name a possible power source for the procurement running from Anthropic's April government MoU to its reported 300 to 500MW capacity process and its reported hunt to build what would be Australia's largest data centre.
SunCable's own schedule has Barkly power from around 2028 and Darwin supply from 2032, putting any Anthropic offtake in the 2030s.
Anthropic would be the second hyperscale-class name reported in talks over the site in six months, after Energy News Bulletin reported in December 2025 that Google was in advanced discussions to anchor a data centre precinct beside the same solar farm. Neither Anthropic nor SunCable has publicly confirmed the current talks.

What The Australian reported

The Australian reported on 15 June 2026 that Anthropic is in advanced talks with SunCable, the renewable energy developer majority owned by Mike Cannon-Brookes, on a project it valued at roughly A$40 billion. SunCable is led by chief executive Ryan Willemsen-Bell and is building the Australia-Asia PowerLink, a solar and battery project in the Northern Territory's Barkly region. The talks are what is reported; the figures and structure of any agreement are not public.

Anthropic's Australian operations to date have centred on Sydney, where it has built a team and is courting developers. SunCable's generation sits more than 800 kilometres south of Darwin. For a frontier lab, Powell Creek's appeal would be cheap power at scale.

Anthropic would be the second hyperscale-class name reported in talks over the site in six months. Energy News Bulletin reported in December 2025 that Google was in advanced discussions to anchor a data centre precinct beside the SunCable solar farm, which points to a precinct seeking an anchor tenant. Neither Anthropic nor SunCable has publicly confirmed the current talks.

Anthropic has signalled multi-hundred-megawatt Australian demand since April

The talks name a possible supplier for demand Anthropic has been signalling in public since April. It signed a memorandum of understanding with the Australian Government on 1 April 2026, committing to firmed renewable energy investment and to projects that add new electricity supply on top of the existing grid. A dedicated solar and battery precinct would be one literal form of that commitment. Anthropic then ran a reported process for 300 to 500MW of Australian data centre capacity, and began courting developers to build what would be the largest facility in the country.

Anthropic posted its first Data Center Energy Lead for Australia earlier this month, a role briefed to secure multi-hundred-megawatt capacity and power purchase agreements across the National Electricity Market, the Wholesale Electricity Market in Western Australia, and the Northern Territory Electricity Market. The Northern Territory was the unusual entry on that list, and SunCable is the obvious NT project it could point to. Firmed power is the gating input for a large build, and the SunCable talks line up with Anthropic addressing it.

A behind-the-meter precinct skips the grid queue

A SunCable precinct builds generation next to the load instead of waiting in the grid queue. Data centre developers in New South Wales and Victoria face a connection queue that can run for years, with more than 5GW of data centre load waiting on transmission the National Electricity Market has not yet built. A precinct in the Barkly, sized to a single customer's offtake, would sidestep that queue entirely.

SunCable has been Cannon-Brookes' project since September 2023, when a Grok Ventures-led consortium acquired it out of administration after a split with co-investor Andrew Forrest. The Cannon-Brookes and Forrest bets on Sun Cable and Squadron Energy are the family-office energy play now converging on AI infrastructure. Conceived as a renewable export play sending solar to Singapore by subsea cable, the project made its data-centre pivot explicit in September 2025, when SunCable reset its first priority to supplying Northern Territory customers, data centres first. The company described the digital sector as the first mover into large-scale renewable supply and put the Barkly region forward as a site for data precincts.

The geography points to training workloads

Location also shapes what the site can do. Low-latency inference, the compute that answers a user's prompt in real time, needs to sit near population and near subsea cable landings. Powell Creek is neither. It is remote, far from Darwin's cable landings, and thin on local workforce.

Large-scale model training is the workload better suited to those conditions. Training runs are latency-tolerant and power-hungry, and they reward what the Barkly offers: abundant solar, land at scale, and room to add battery storage in modular blocks. That profile matches Anthropic's needs as a frontier model developer. Neither company has said what would run at Powell Creek, so the training reading is an inference from the geography rather than a confirmed plan.

The Barkly is also one of the hardest places in Australia to recruit to, and SunCable's own forecasts put operational roles for the full project in the low hundreds. A training campus can run with a small specialist crew on rotational rosters, where a metro inference hub serving live users cannot, so the thin local labour market suits a remote, low-headcount training site even as it remains a real execution risk for whoever builds there.

The timeline makes this a long-dated option

SunCable is targeting a final investment decision at the end of 2027, with Barkly power from around 2028 and Darwin supply from 2032. Anthropic is procuring now, for compute it wants this decade, so SunCable's power is a 2030s prospect that arrives well after the current 300 to 500MW process needs to land.

Any agreement would, on these timelines, more plausibly be long-dated: an offtake or partnership that helps underwrite SunCable's investment case and gives Anthropic a claim on firmed renewable power in the 2030s, well beyond the current procurement round.