Anthropic has signed a 20-year lease for a data center campus in Hawesville, Kentucky, in a deal the operator, TeraWulf, expects to generate approximately $19 billion in contracted revenue over the initial term. The campus, called Justified Data, will supply about 401 megawatts of critical IT load, with the first capacity expected online in the second half of 2027 and the full 401 megawatts in place by early 2028. TeraWulf said the arrangement is expected to be supported by investment-grade credit.
TeraWulf is a former bitcoin miner, and the lease is a clean example of a trade now happening across the industry: companies that built power-hungry sites to mine cryptocurrency are repurposing them, or their grid connections, to host AI compute instead. The market rewarded the pivot immediately, sending TeraWulf’s shares sharply higher on the announcement. “The Anthropic lease validates our strategy and establishes a long-duration revenue stream with one of the world’s leading AI companies,” chairman and chief executive Paul Prager said.
In the same announcement, TeraWulf said it would sell its 50.1 percent stake in the Abernathy joint venture, a 168-megawatt campus under development in Abernathy, Texas, to an investor group led by its partner Fluidstack for total consideration of about $530 million, monetizing a roughly $450 million investment at a premium. The two moves together point the company more squarely at large, single-tenant AI leases like the Anthropic deal.
For Anthropic, the lease is another large block of secured power in a buildout that has grown strikingly fast. The company has been assembling its own infrastructure operation under a former Microsoft Azure executive, and its appetite for compute now runs to hundreds of megawatts locked up years in advance. The financing pattern is familiar too: long-dated, contracted AI leases underwritten by investment-grade or private credit have become a distinct asset class, letting operators raise against a signed tenant before a single server is installed.
The bet on both sides rests on capacity that does not fully exist yet. TeraWulf still has to deliver 401 megawatts on schedule between late 2027 and early 2028, and Anthropic is committing to two decades of payments on the expectation that its demand for compute will keep climbing across that span. Given the trajectory of frontier-model training and inference, that is not the riskiest assumption in the deal.
Sources: TeraWulf, CNBC, Data Center Dynamics
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By the Control Plane Editorial Team