Anthropic has signed one of the largest single data-center commitments in the artificial-intelligence buildout to date: a 20-year lease at a purpose-built campus in Hawesville, Kentucky, that is expected to generate roughly $19 billion of contracted revenue for its landlord, the formerly bitcoin-focused infrastructure company TeraWulf Inc. (Nasdaq: WULF). The deal, announced July 6, lands just months before Anthropic is expected to file publicly for an initial public offering, and it reads as a bet that the company's revenue can keep pace with the enormous compute obligations it is stacking up.
TeraWulf disclosed the agreement in a press release and 8-K filing, and Wall Street reacted immediately. Shares of the company jumped more than 16% in premarket trading, with several outlets framing the transaction as the moment TeraWulf completed its pivot from crypto mining into a landlord for frontier AI labs.
Inside the lease
The lease covers TeraWulf's Justified Data campus in Hawesville, Kentucky, a site the company acquired in February 2026. According to TeraWulf, the campus will accommodate approximately 401 megawatts of critical IT load, built out in multiple phases. Initial capacity is slated to come online in the second half of 2027, with the facility ramping to its full 401 MW by early 2028. The company said the roughly $19 billion in contracted revenue spans the initial 20-year term and is expected to be supported by an investment-grade credit — a detail that matters, because Anthropic has reportedly been seeking to have Google backstop its lease obligations to secure better terms.
Crucially, this is a lease, not a capital purchase. Anthropic is renting compute capacity rather than building and owning the facility outright, mirroring the structure of its other infrastructure arrangements, including deals tied to Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Elon Musk's SpaceX-linked "Colossus" project. The approach lets Anthropic secure gigawatts of power and floor space without carrying the full construction cost on its own balance sheet — a meaningful consideration for a company preparing to open its books to public investors.
For TeraWulf, the economics are striking. In investor materials, the company indicated it intends to invest between $3 billion and $4 billion to build out the data center — less than one-fifth of the lease's headline value over its life. TeraWulf simultaneously announced it is selling its 50.1% stake in the Abernathy, Texas joint venture to an investor group led by Fluidstack, monetizing an approximately $450 million investment at a premium and freeing up capital to fund the Anthropic project and other wholly owned sites.
A validation quote — and a strategy
TeraWulf Chairman and CEO Paul Prager tied the announcement directly to promises the company made earlier in the year.
"When we announced the Justified Data campus acquisition in February, we told investors that we expected to secure a major customer commitment by around the end of the second quarter of 2026," Prager said. "We are proud to announce this landmark partnership with Anthropic."
He went further on what the agreement means for the company's repositioning. "The Anthropic lease validates our strategy and establishes a long-duration revenue stream with one of the world's leading AI companies," Prager said, adding that it "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."
TeraWulf's pitch to AI customers leans on its energy profile: the company has emphasized nuclear, hydro, and solar sourcing as it assembles roughly 1.5 gigawatts of brownfield capacity across Kentucky and Maryland, including a separate Eastern Kentucky site, the Muskie Data Campus, that it says can eventually support more than 1 GW. Zero-carbon power is both a marketing point and a hedge against the regulatory scrutiny and grid-interconnection bottlenecks now dogging the sector.
Why the timing matters
The lease slots into a much larger picture. Anthropic has signed more than a dozen letters of intent for direct US data-center leases totaling over 1 gigawatt of capacity. Many of those were non-binding, giving the company room for due diligence; the TeraWulf agreement is a firm, long-term commitment that converts intent into obligation.
That firmness is the point. Anthropic confidentially filed an S-1 with the SEC on June 1, 2026, following a $65 billion Series H that valued the company at roughly $965 billion post-money, and it is widely reported to be targeting an October 2026 public debut. A $19 billion, two-decade commitment is exactly the kind of forward liability that IPO investors will scrutinize — but it also signals management's confidence that Anthropic's revenue trajectory, driven by Claude's enterprise and API business, can support it. Locking in power and capacity now, ahead of a compute crunch that has sent data-center and power stocks surging, is a way of guaranteeing the raw materials of model training and inference before rivals bid them away.
The transaction also underscores a structural shift in who finances AI's physical footprint. By leasing from a credit-supported landlord — with reported backing from parties like Google, Apollo, and Blackstone circling the broader financing — Anthropic pushes construction risk and capital intensity onto specialized operators like TeraWulf, while retaining the flexibility to scale. It is a template the industry is rapidly standardizing around.
What to watch next
Three things bear watching. First, Anthropic's public S-1: how the company discloses these lease obligations, and whether Google's backstop materializes formally, will shape investor appetite ahead of an October listing. Second, execution risk at Hawesville — TeraWulf must deliver 401 MW on schedule through 2027 and into early 2028, in a market where power interconnection and equipment lead times routinely slip. Third, TeraWulf itself: with the Anthropic revenue stream now anchoring its story and Bitcoin mining fading into the background, the question is whether it can repeat the feat and fill its remaining 1.5 GW pipeline with similarly creditworthy AI tenants.
"The Anthropic lease validates our strategy and establishes a long-duration revenue stream with one of the world's leading AI companies."— Paul Prager, Chairman and CEO, TeraWulf Inc.