Anthropic Signs a $19 Billion, 20-Year Data-Center Lease With TeraWulf

Anthropic has signed a 20-year lease with TeraWulf for a massive AI data-center campus — a deal the companies say will generate roughly $19 billion in contracted revenue over its initial term. As CNBC and CoinDesk reported, TeraWulf's stock soared on the news — a striking second act for a company that started life as a Bitcoin miner and is now, in effect, an AI landlord.

The numbers are eye-watering. Anthropic will take up to 401 megawatts of computing capacity at TeraWulf's "Justified Data" campus in Hawesville, Kentucky — a 790-acre site built on a former aluminum smelter, chosen for its existing high-voltage power transmission and fiber. Initial operations are slated for late 2027, with full capacity online by early 2028. TeraWulf plans to invest $3–4 billion to build it out, less than a fifth of the lease's headline value.

Locking up power before the IPO

The lease is one more piece of Anthropic's frantic compute land-grab. The company has already committed to multi-gigawatt deals with Google, Amazon, and Broadcom, and it's preparing an S-1 for an October 2026 IPO on the back of a $900 billion valuation. In frontier AI, the binding constraint isn't ideas or even chips — it's power, and 20-year leases are how you guarantee it.

It also underscores a quiet industry shift: the crypto-mining buildout of the last decade — sites with cheap power, land, and grid hookups already in place — is being repurposed into AI infrastructure. TeraWulf simultaneously sold its majority stake in a separate mining joint venture to Fluidstack, making the pivot explicit.

For Anthropic, the risk is timing: 401 MW that doesn't switch on until 2028 does nothing for the models it's training in 2026. But with rivals bidding for the same megawatts, signing a two-decade lease now is a bet that demand — and Anthropic's revenue, reportedly on track past $45 billion — will more than fill it.