Anthropic has agreed to lease a 401-megawatt data center campus from TeraWulf, the Bitcoin-mining company turned AI infrastructure provider, in a 20-year deal expected to generate about $19 billion in contracted revenue, the companies announced on July 6.
A former Bitcoin mining operator repurposed for AI
The campus, called Justified Data, sits in Hawesville, Kentucky, on the Ohio River. TeraWulf built its business mining Bitcoin at industrial scale before pivoting toward leasing power-hungry sites to AI companies as demand for training and inference capacity has outstripped available electricity. Under the new lease, TeraWulf will build out the site in phases, bringing initial capacity online in the second half of 2027 and reaching the full 401 megawatts by early 2028.
TeraWulf CEO Paul Prager said the agreement “position[s] TeraWulf for its next phase of growth,” pointing to the company’s direct customer relationships and control over how its campuses evolve over time.
Selling a stake to help fund the buildout
Alongside the Anthropic lease, TeraWulf agreed to sell its 50.1% stake in the Abernathy joint venture — a separate 168-megawatt campus in Texas — to an investor group led by joint-venture partner Fluidstack. The sale monetizes roughly $450 million TeraWulf had invested in Abernathy, at a premium, and the company says it will redeploy the proceeds into sites it owns outright rather than shared ventures.
Investors welcomed the news: TeraWulf’s stock jumped on the announcement, as the deal reinforces the company’s shift from a commodity Bitcoin miner to a data-center operator with long-term, investment-grade-rated revenue from an AI customer.
Part of a bigger compute race
The lease adds to Anthropic’s rapidly expanding infrastructure footprint. The company has committed tens of billions of dollars in recent months to secure computing capacity across multiple hardware providers as it races to keep pace with surging demand for its Claude models. Kentucky becomes the latest state to host a large-scale AI data center, as power availability — not just chip supply — increasingly determines where AI companies can grow.