TeraWulf Signs $19B AI Data Center Lease With Anthropic

Former Bitcoin miner TeraWulf (NASDAQ: WULF) announced on July 6 that it had signed a 20-year lease agreement with Anthropic, the AI company behind Claude, for its Justified Data campus in Hawesville, Kentucky.

The deal is expected to generate approximately $19 billion in contracted revenue over the initial lease term, a figure that exceeds TeraWulf's own market capitalization at the time of the announcement. Shares surged more than 17% in premarket trading.

The announcement marks one of the most consequential public signals yet that the crypto mining sector's pivot to AI infrastructure has moved beyond experimentation into long-term strategic commitment.

From Block Rewards to Billion-Dollar Leases

TeraWulf acquired the Hawesville site, now branded as the Justified Data campus, in February 2026 for $200 million. At the time, CEO Paul Prager told investors the company expected to secure a major customer commitment by around the end of Q2 2026. The Anthropic deal, announced on the first Monday of Q3, delivered on that timeline.

The campus is designed to support up to 401 megawatts of critical IT load across multiple phases, with the following delivery schedule:

• Initial power delivery: second half of 2027
• Full buildout: early 2028
• Two five-year renewal options, extending the potential commitment to 30 years total

Anthropic's payment obligations are backed by investment-grade credit support. Unlike a typical cloud contract that can be renegotiated or cancelled on relatively short notice, a 20-year lease with renewal options and investment-grade backing functions closer to a bond, transforming a speculative infrastructure bet into a predictable, long-duration revenue stream.

The Anthropic lease validates our strategy and establishes a long-duration revenue stream with one of the world's leading AI companies. The lease provides approximately $19 billion of contracted lease revenue over its initial term, creates a framework for future expansion, and demonstrates the value of our ability to source power, develop infrastructure, and secure long-term customer commitments.

– Paul Prager, Chairman & CEO, TeraWulf

In a simultaneous move, TeraWulf disclosed the sale of its entire 50.1% stake in the Abernathy Joint Venture, a 168MW data center in Abernathy, Texas, co-developed with Fluidstack and backed by Google, to an investor group led by Fluidstack for approximately $530 million.

The company framed the sale as monetizing roughly $450 million of invested capital at a premium to redeploy into wholly owned projects. The strategic logic: exit shared assets, concentrate capital on infrastructure the company controls outright, and lock in anchor tenants on those owned sites.

The Mining-to-AI Rotation, Validated at Scale

TeraWulf is not the first crypto mining company to pivot toward AI infrastructure, but the scale of the Anthropic deal puts it in a different category from earlier attempts.

• Bitcoin mining revenue is tied to BTC price, network hash rate, and the block reward halving schedule – variables that make long-term planning inherently difficult, as seen in how even the largest corporate BTC holder has begun selling to meet obligations.
• AI compute demand, by contrast, is driven by enterprise contract cycles and the capex plans of well-funded AI labs, which tend to be far more predictable. A miner that can convert power sourcing capabilities and land holdings into data center infrastructure can, in theory, exchange that volatility for something closer to a utility-like income stream.

What the TeraWulf-Anthropic deal does is prove that theory at the $19 billion level. Anthropic needed dedicated compute capacity large enough to justify a 20-year campus lease, rather than simply purchasing cloud credits from AWS, Google, or Azure. That it turned to a former Bitcoin miner's newly acquired Kentucky site reflects both the intensity of AI compute demand and the operational credibility that mining-sector infrastructure operators have built in sourcing power and building at speed.

The market reaction across adjacent mining stocks on July 6 reinforced the sector-wide signal:

• IREN +13%
• Hut 8 +10.5%
• Cipher Mining +9.5%
• Bitdeer +8%

None of these companies announced deals of their own. The market appeared to treat the TeraWulf announcement as evidence that the AI infrastructure opportunity is real, accessible, and likely to extend across the sector.

Anthropic's side of the equation is also worth examining. Reports from June 2026 indicated the company had signed more than a dozen letters of intent with data center developers in a short period, part of a broader infrastructure push that also includes plans to develop its own AI chip.

It has separately leased capacity from Colossus 1, the data center operated by SpaceX's xAI, at a reported $1.25 billion per month, with additional space reserved in Colossus II. The Kentucky campus sits alongside those arrangements, suggesting Anthropic is building a deliberately distributed infrastructure base rather than consolidating into a single facility or relying on any one provider.

TeraWulf's Q2 2026 earnings release is scheduled for August 6 – the first opportunity for the company to address investor questions on the deal's financial mechanics, construction timeline, and what the Abernathy exit means for near-term capital allocation.

Sources

• TeraWulf Inc. – Press Release: Anthropic Lease at Justified Data Campus and Sale of Majority Interest in Abernathy JV https://investors.terawulf.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/142/terawulf-announces-anthropic-lease-at-justified-data-campus-and-sale-of-majority-interest-in-abernathy-joint-venture-to-fluidstack
• CNBC – TeraWulf shares soar after Anthropic leases data center in Kentucky https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/06/anthropic-terawulf-data-center-ai.html
• Data Center Dynamics – Anthropic signs $19bn, 20-year lease for Kentucky data center with TeraWulf https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/anthropic-signs-19bn-20-year-lease-for-kentucky-data-center-with-terawulf/