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

Anthropic has signed a 20-year lease with data-center operator TeraWulf for an AI infrastructure campus in Hawesville, Kentucky, roughly an hour southwest of Louisville. The deal, announced July 6, 2026, is projected to generate approximately $19 billion in revenue for TeraWulf over the lease term and lands alongside a separate sale of TeraWulf's stake in a Texas data-center project.

What's new

The Kentucky facility will deliver around 400 megawatts of capacity, with initial power expected in the second half of 2027. TeraWulf CEO Paul Prager framed the deal as validation of the company's pivot into AI infrastructure: "The Anthropic lease validates our strategy and establishes a long-duration revenue stream with one of the world's leading AI companies."

TeraWulf's stock jumped more than 16% in premarket trading on the news, extending a year in which its shares have already gained more than 80%. In a related transaction disclosed the same day, TeraWulf sold its 50% stake in a separate 168-megawatt data-center facility in Abernathy, Texas, to an investor group led by Fluidstack.

Context

TeraWulf started as a Bitcoin-mining operator before pivoting to lease its power-dense sites to AI compute tenants, a path several former crypto-mining companies have followed as demand for GPU-hosting capacity has outstripped available data-center power nationwide. Anthropic, for its part, has been assembling infrastructure commitments across multiple partners rather than relying on any single cloud or landlord — it has separately worked with Google, Microsoft Azure, and Amazon on compute arrangements, and has reportedly been pursuing additional large-scale capacity commitments in other markets as well.

The deal fits a broader pattern across the frontier labs in 2026: AI companies increasingly signing direct, decade-plus leases with power-and-land-rich operators, rather than solely renting capacity through the major cloud providers, to lock in the physical footprint their training and inference roadmaps will need years in advance.

Why it matters

A 20-year lease is a bet that AI compute demand — and Anthropic's own growth — will remain durable on a timescale far beyond typical technology-industry planning horizons. For TeraWulf, it converts a former mining site into a long-duration revenue stream, which is why the stock reaction was immediate and sharp.

For Anthropic, the deal is another data point in how much capital is now flowing into securing physical AI infrastructure directly, rather than exclusively through hyperscaler cloud contracts. Compute capacity has become as much a competitive battleground among frontier labs as model capability itself, and long-term leases like this one are increasingly how that competition plays out — years before the power actually comes online.