TeraWulf Lands $19 Billion AI Data Center Lease With Anthropic
The Kentucky campus where TeraWulf is building a data center for artificial-intelligence workloads has a tenant with a name that anchors the sector. TeraWulf said Monday it had signed a 20-year lease with Anthropic covering roughly 401 megawatts of critical IT load at its Justified Data campus, a deal the company said would generate about $19 billion in contract revenue over the initial term.
The lease is one of the largest of its kind in the fast-growing market for AI infrastructure. Anthropic, the artificial-intelligence company behind the Claude chatbot family, will use the facility to run training and inference workloads, according to people familiar with the deal. Construction will proceed in phases, with the first capacity expected online in the second half of 2027 and full operation by early 2028.
TeraWulf said the lease is backed by an investment-grade credit entity, a structure that lets the data center developer borrow against contracted future revenue. The arrangement reflects how AI deals have begun to resemble utility contracts, with long terms, large committed loads and financing tied to the strength of the tenant.
The company announced a second transaction on the same day. TeraWulf said it would sell its 50.1% stake in the Abernathy joint venture to a consortium led by Fluidstack, an AI cloud infrastructure company, for about $450 million. TeraWulf described the sale as a premium exit on its investment in the project.
The two moves reshape a company that began life as a bitcoin miner. TeraWulf built its first facilities to power cryptocurrency mining, then began converting capacity toward high-performance computing and AI hosting as demand for compute exploded. The Anthropic lease cements that shift, giving the company a blue-chip tenant for years to come.
The pivot has been a common path in the data center industry. Companies that once hosted mining rigs discovered that the same buildings, power connections and cooling systems could serve AI workloads at higher rents. Bitcoin’s boom-and-bust cycles made the conversion urgent; the AI boom made it lucrative.
The deal also illustrates the balance of power in AI infrastructure. Data center developers are competing for a shrinking supply of available power, and AI companies are paying for certainty. Anthropic, which has been building out its own compute capacity with partners across the country, gains a fixed, long-term home for a meaningful share of its workloads.
Kentucky is part of a broader migration of data centers into the American heartland. States with cheap electricity, available land and tax incentives have been winning projects that once went to Northern Virginia and other traditional hubs. Utilities in the region have been racing to add transmission capacity, and power availability, not land, has become the binding constraint on how fast these campuses can grow.
For investors, the numbers are the point. Roughly $19 billion in contracted revenue spread over two decades gives TeraWulf a visibility that most data center operators lack, analysts said. The company can now underwrite new construction against known cash flows rather than speculative demand.
The sale of the Abernathy stake, meanwhile, frees capital for the Justified Data buildout. Fluidstack and its consortium take over a project TeraWulf had been developing, allowing TeraWulf to concentrate its balance sheet on the campus that now carries the Anthropic contract. The transaction also gives TeraWulf cash to fund the early stages of construction without diluting shareholders.
The broader market for AI data centers remains crowded and costly. Power, land and construction costs have all risen, and some analysts have questioned whether the pace of new supply will outrun demand. Deals like this one, signed years in advance with the largest AI companies, suggest the opposite: tenants are securing capacity before it exists.
The deal follows a pattern set by the sector’s biggest names. OpenAI, Anthropic and other AI labs have signed multibillion-dollar agreements with data center operators and cloud companies to secure computing capacity years in advance. Those agreements have become the industry’s version of long-term power purchase contracts, and they are reshaping how developers finance construction, shifting risk from speculative tenants to contracted ones.
TeraWulf’s timing also reflects the state of the power market. Utilities in Kentucky and across the Southeast have seen a surge of requests from data center developers, and queues for new grid connections have stretched to years in some regions. The Justified Data campus, which has secured its power position, stands ahead of many rivals in that respect, analysts said, and the Anthropic lease gives the project a revenue base that most competitors cannot match.
The announcements come at a moment when investors are scrutinizing how AI infrastructure companies convert hype into contracted revenue. TeraWulf’s answer, it now says, is a 20-year contract with one of the biggest names in AI. Whether the project comes online on schedule, in a state where power is scarce and construction labor is tight, will be the test that follows.
