Anthropic signs 20-year, $19 billion Kentucky data center lease with TeraWulf

TeraWulf Inc. (Nasdaq: WULF) said on July 6 it signed a 20-year lease with the AI lab Anthropic worth roughly $19 billion in contracted revenue. The deal covers a single 401-megawatt campus in Hawesville, Kentucky.

It is one of the largest single-tenant compute commitments a frontier AI lab has disclosed, and it shows how far in advance those labs are now locking down power. The site, TeraWulf’s Justified Data campus, will be built in phases: initial capacity is expected online in the second half of 2027, ramping to the full 401 megawatts of critical IT load by early 2028. Anthropic holds two successive five-year renewal options, which could extend the arrangement to 2050.

The scale reflects a market where electrical capacity, not chips or land, has become the binding constraint on AI expansion. Signing a 401-megawatt lease years before the servers switch on is a bet that Anthropic’s demand for training and inference will keep climbing well into the next decade.

In a separate transaction disclosed the same day, TeraWulf said it agreed to sell its 50.1 percent stake in the Abernathy Joint Venture, a 168-megawatt AI data center in Abernathy, Texas, to an investor group led by Fluidstack. TeraWulf said the sale lets it cash out its roughly $450 million investment above what it put in, freeing up capital to redirect into the larger Kentucky build.

Taken together, the two moves concentrate TeraWulf on scale: exit a mid-sized joint venture at a gain, then focus on a campus more than twice its size under a two-decade contract. TeraWulf shares rose sharply after the announcement, climbing about 20 percent, according to market reporting.

The revenue figure is TeraWulf’s own projection over the lease’s initial term, not an independently audited number, and phased builds of this size routinely slip. Whether the Hawesville campus delivers first power on schedule in the second half of 2027 will be the first real test of the timeline both companies have committed to.