TeraWulf signs $19B data center lease
TeraWulf will convert a former Kentucky aluminum smelter into a 401MW data campus for Anthropic, with initial capacity online in the second half of 2027.
TeraWulf signed a 20-year lease with Anthropic for its Justified Data Campus in Hawesville, Kentucky, a 790-acre former aluminum-smelter site, the company announced on July 6. The deal is expected to generate roughly $19 billion in contracted revenue over its term, with about 401 megawatts of planned IT load. Initial capacity is due online in the second half of 2027, with full buildout by early 2028; TeraWulf plans to invest $3 billion to $4 billion in construction.
Alongside the Anthropic lease, TeraWulf sold its 50.1% stake in a separate joint venture, the Abernathy data center project, to a group led by Fluidstack for approximately $450 million, trimming its own balance-sheet exposure while it takes on the larger, longer-term Anthropic commitment. TeraWulf shares rose about 13% on the news.
The lease is notable less for its size than its length: a 20-year contract is unusually long in a market where most AI compute deals have been renewed or renegotiated on much shorter cycles as model architectures and hardware generations turn over. It suggests Anthropic is willing to commit to fixed, long-duration capacity rather than staying fully flexible across cloud providers.
For anyone tracking AI infrastructure economics, this is another data point that frontier labs are increasingly behaving like utilities, locking in physical capacity years in advance, rather than purely renting elastic cloud compute.