Anthropic signs a 20-year, ~$19B lease for 401 MW at TeraWulf’s Justified Data campus in Hawesville, Kentucky
Confirmed
The takeaway
On July 6, 2026 TeraWulf, a former bitcoin miner, announced a 20-year lease with Anthropic for about 401 MW of critical IT load at its Justified Data campus in Hawesville, Kentucky.
Status
- Claim
Confirmed
- Our reporting
- High confidence
- Importance
- 3 of 5
- Last verified
- 12 October 2026
Your AI and this story
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None of these four assistants can know about it. The closest, Claude Opus 5.5, stops 6 days before it.
Key facts
- Lease: 20 years, ~401 MW of critical IT load, ~$19B of contracted lease revenue over the initial term (TeraWulf press release, July 6, 2026)
- Delivery in phases: first capacity in service in H2 2027, full 401 MW by early 2028; the lease ‘creates a framework for future expansion’
- TeraWulf said the lease is ‘expected to be supported by an investment-grade credit’; the release does not name the credit provider
- Same release: TeraWulf sells its 50.1% stake in the Abernathy, Texas joint venture (168 MW critical IT load; ~$450M invested) to an investor group led by its partner Fluidstack, at an undisclosed premium to invested capital
- Market reaction (Decrypt, July 6): TeraWulf shares rose nearly 14%; other miners turned AI landlords also rose (IREN 13%+, Hut 8 12%, Cipher 11%)
- CEO Paul Prager: ‘The Anthropic lease validates our strategy and establishes a long-duration revenue stream’
- Unverified here (search summaries of an SEC 8-K and analyst notes, not read directly): the lessor is the subsidiary Raylan Data LLC; two five-year extensions could raise revenue to ~$33B; the site is a former Century Aluminum smelter bought in February 2026
What happened
TeraWulf, which moved from bitcoin mining to leasing AI data centers, announced that Anthropic will take about 401 MW at its Hawesville, Kentucky campus for 20 years. The company expects about $19B in lease revenue over the initial term. On the same day it agreed to sell its majority stake in a Texas joint venture to Fluidstack, to put the capital into sites it owns outright.
Why it matters
Anthropic rents most of its compute through long leases with data-center developers instead of building its own sites. This lease is one of the larger single-site deals of 2026, next to the Nscale campus in West Virginia. It also shows how former bitcoin miners with power contracts became landlords for frontier labs.
Sources
4 sources from 4 sites. Numbers match the chips in the text.
4 sources: 1 primary, 3 press
Primary
- TeraWulf press release: Anthropic lease at Justified Data campus and sale of Abernathy JV stake to Fluidstack (July 6, 2026)investors.terawulf.com, official
Press
- Decrypt: Bitcoin mining stocks jump as TeraWulf signs $19 billion lease with Anthropicdecrypt.co, press
- DCD: Anthropic signs $19bn, 20-year lease for Kentucky data center with TeraWulf (not readable by the fetcher)datacenterdynamics.com, press
- Spectrum News 1: AI company Anthropic commits to long-term Hawesville campus (not read)spectrumnews1.com, press
Changes
- Filed as a review