Summary
On July 6, 2026, TeraWulf Inc. announced a 20-year lease agreement with Anthropic for a purpose-built AI infrastructure campus at the Justified Data site in Hawesville, Kentucky. The lease is structured to generate approximately $19 billion in contracted revenue over its initial term, covering approximately 401 megawatts of critical IT load. Initial capacity delivery is expected in the second half of 2027, with the campus ramping to full capacity in early 2028. The announcement is the largest disclosed single-tenant, single-site AI compute lease on record at the time of signing.
What Happened
TeraWulf filed an 8-K with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on July 6, 2026, disclosing the execution of a lease agreement with Anthropic for the Justified Data campus in Hawesville, Kentucky — a site located approximately one hour southwest of Louisville, built on the grounds of a former aluminum smelting facility. The campus is under development and will provide approximately 401 megawatts of critical IT load dedicated exclusively to Anthropic's high-performance computing operations.
Under the lease terms, Anthropic's rent obligations commence upon delivery of the leased premises and run for an initial term of twenty years. Anthropic holds two successive five-year renewal options, extending the potential term to thirty years. TeraWulf disclosed contracted revenue of approximately $19 billion over the initial 20-year period. Anthropic's payment obligations are described in the filing as expected to be supported by investment-grade credit.
Capacity delivery is planned in phases: initial power is expected in the second half of 2027, with the campus reaching its full 401-megawatt build-out in early 2028. TeraWulf has initiated financing for the project; Bloomberg reported on July 9 that the company was targeting approximately $3.5 billion in leveraged debt, with Morgan Stanley expected to lead the process.
TeraWulf shares rose more than 16 percent in premarket trading on the announcement date. The company also disclosed simultaneously that it had agreed to sell its 50.1 percent stake in the Abernathy Joint Venture — a 168-megawatt data center campus in Abernathy, Texas, co-owned with Fluidstack — for approximately $530 million in three installments. The proceeds are identified in TeraWulf's statement as capital to be redeployed into wholly owned AI infrastructure development, of which the Justified Data campus is the primary focus.
TeraWulf was founded in 2021 as a bitcoin mining company. It had been transitioning its power capacity and site development pipeline toward AI data center hosting over the preceding two years, citing the superior economics of long-term AI compute leasing relative to the volatility of cryptocurrency mining. The Hawesville facility's prior use as an aluminum smelter provided existing industrial power infrastructure, substation access, and site permits that reduced the capital and timeline required for data center development compared to greenfield construction.
Why It Matters
A 20-year, 401-megawatt, $19 billion lease represents a class of infrastructure commitment with few historical precedents in the AI sector. The term structure — twenty years with renewal options — commits Anthropic to a physical compute location on a timeline comparable to major industrial facilities or university research campuses, not to cloud service agreements that can be modified in months. At 401 megawatts, the Justified Data campus will represent one of the largest single AI compute concentrations operated by any lab when fully online.
The structure of the deal illustrates a shift in how frontier AI labs are acquiring compute capacity. Earlier infrastructure commitments — cloud agreements with Amazon, Google, and Microsoft — were primarily contractual obligations for access to shared compute resources with no physical tie to a specific location. A direct data center lease, by contrast, gives Anthropic long-term capacity locked at a fixed cost structure, isolated from demand pricing and independent of the cloud providers with whom Anthropic maintains commercial API and model deployment relationships. Bloomberg's reporting that TeraWulf is seeking $3.5 billion in project financing against the Anthropic lease contract suggests the lease itself serves as a bankable asset — the long-term contracted revenue supports debt at a scale that enables Anthropic to effectively pre-fund its infrastructure build without the full capital appearing on Anthropic's balance sheet.
What is not publicly disclosed: the exact megawatt-hour pricing or per-rack cost embedded in the $19 billion total; whether the lease covers power delivery only or includes any facility operations staffing; and what portion of Anthropic's total compute roadmap the Hawesville campus represents. The Justified Data timeline — initial delivery late 2027, full capacity early 2028 — also means that actual production use of this capacity lies more than a year in the future, and any delays in construction or power delivery would shift that timeline further.
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