Anthropic Locks In 401 MW Kentucky Data Center With 20-Year TeraWulf Lease

Anthropic signed a 20-year lease Monday for a data center campus in Hawesville, Kentucky, committing to what is structured as roughly $19 billion in contracted revenue for the landlord, TeraWulf. The underlying asset is a former aluminum processing facility that TeraWulf bought in February for $200 million and has been converting into high-performance computing space ever since.

The capacity numbers are concrete: according to an 8-K filing reviewed by TeraWulf and reported by Data Center Dynamics, Anthropic's subsidiary Raylan Data LLC will deliver approximately 401 megawatts of critical IT load in phases, with initial power expected in the second half of 2027 and full buildout targeted for early 2028. That's not a letter of intent or a memorandum of understanding. It's a signed lease with a phased delivery schedule.

The site itself matters as much as the headline number. As SiliconAngle reported, the 790-acre campus in Hawesville already has existing power transmission and fiber-optic infrastructure in place. Building new overhead transmission lines can take years. Inheriting a site that already has grid connection is one of the few ways to compress the timeline on a project this size. The facility will use a closed-loop cooling system to handle heat from the compute load inside.

TeraWulf's own economics are worth noting. According to SiliconAngle, the company plans to invest between $3 billion and $4 billion to build the campus out. Against $19 billion in contracted lease revenue, that's a significant margin if Anthropic stays the full term. TeraWulf posted $34 million in revenue last quarter, so this deal is a complete redefinition of the company's financial profile, not an incremental addition to it.

The former-crypto-miner angle is real, not incidental. As CNBC reported, TeraWulf is a bitcoin mining company that has been pivoting to AI data center infrastructure. Its stock was up more than 80% this year before Monday's announcement, and jumped an additional 16% in premarket trading after the deal was disclosed. On the same day, the company also announced it would sell its 50.1% stake in a separate 168-megawatt campus under development in Abernathy, Texas, to an investor group led by Fluidstack, for approximately $530 million in three installments. TeraWulf said it intends to redeploy that capital into data center opportunities where it maintains direct ownership and operational control.

For Anthropic, this is one piece of a much larger infrastructure accumulation. Data Center Dynamics noted that the company has signed cloud capacity commitments with AWS, CoreWeave, Akamai, and a $50 billion partnership with Fluidstack, alongside a $200 billion cloud agreement with Google. In June, reports emerged that Anthropic had signed more than a dozen letters of intent with data center developers. The Kentucky lease is the first of those to close into a signed agreement with confirmed capacity numbers.

One thing the sources don't resolve: what chips go in the building. SiliconAngle flagged that Anthropic's hardware stack for this facility remains unspecified, with rumors circulating about a potential custom inference accelerator partnership with Samsung, alongside its existing use of Nvidia, AMD, and Google silicon. The compute architecture decision is the missing component in an otherwise detailed announcement. At 401 megawatts, the chip choice will materially affect both the operational cost and the performance ceiling of whatever Anthropic runs there.

The structural pattern here isn't new, but the scale keeps climbing. AI labs are trading the flexibility of rented cloud capacity for the cost predictability and supply certainty of long-duration owned infrastructure. Twenty years is longer than most enterprise software contracts, longer than many chip generations, and longer than the current generation of large language models has existed.

Sources cited:
- Data Center Dynamics (https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/anthropic-signs-19bn-20-year-lease-for-kentucky-data-center-with-terawulf/)
- TeraWulf 8-K filing via StockTitan (https://www.stocktitan.net/sec-filings/WULF/8-k-terawulf-inc-reports-material-event-19c1a25b1358.html)
- SiliconAngle (https://siliconangle.com/2026/07/06/anthropic-inks-19b-ai-data-center-lease-terawulf/)
- CNBC (https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/06/anthropic-terawulf-data-center-ai.html)
- Spectrum News 1 (Kentucky) (https://spectrumnews1.com/ky/louisville/news/2026/07/06/ai-company-anthropic-commits-to-long-term-hawesville-campus)