Anthropic Signs 20-Year Lease for 401 MW Kentucky Data Center on Former Aluminum Site

Anthropic locked in a 20-year lease on July 6 for a data center campus in Hawesville, Kentucky, in a deal that according to a Form 8-K filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission is expected to generate roughly $19 billion in contracted revenue for landlord TeraWulf over the initial term.

The campus, branded Justified Data, sits on a 790-acre former aluminum smelting facility that TeraWulf acquired from Century Aluminum in February for $200 million. The site already has high-voltage transmission lines and an energized substation on the property, which matters for timeline. As SiliconANGLE noted in its coverage of the deal, building new overhead power transmission lines can take years. Buying a site that already has the grid connection is one of the few ways to compress that schedule.

The facility is designed for approximately 401 megawatts of critical IT load, developed in phases. According to the TeraWulf 8-K reviewed by CNBC, initial capacity comes online in the second half of 2027, with the campus reaching full capacity by early 2028. That's a meaningful gap: Anthropic is signing a 20-year commitment for infrastructure it won't be able to use for over a year.

The deal structure also tells you something about where the compute economics are heading. This is a long-term build-to-suit lease, not a cloud contract. Anthropic already has arrangements with Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and SpaceX's Colossus facility. What it's assembling is a layered stack: third-party cloud for flexibility, and now owned-adjacent, long-term dedicated capacity for predictable cost and control. With an IPO reported to be targeting October 2026, locking in a decade-plus of compute at a fixed contract reduces a major operating variable before the S-1 goes out.

TeraWulf's side of the trade is worth noting. The company started as a bitcoin mining operation and has been converting its infrastructure thesis toward high-performance computing. Alongside the Anthropic announcement, it disclosed the sale of its 50.1% stake in a 168-megawatt Texas joint venture with Fluidstack for approximately $530 million in installments, per reporting by Quartz. TeraWulf said it plans to redeploy that capital into projects where it holds direct ownership rather than shared joint-venture positions, which is exactly the model the Hawesville lease represents.

On cooling, SiliconANGLE reported that the campus will use a closed-loop system that recycles the same coolant rather than drawing from local reservoirs. That detail matters because Hawesville is a small Ohio River town of fewer than 10,000 people, and as Hoodline noted in its local coverage, a community petition against the redevelopment drew more than 1,200 signatures over concerns including water use and traffic. The closed-loop design is the technical answer to the water argument, though whether it holds up in the permitting process is a separate question.

For Anthropic, the calculus here isn't complicated. Inference costs are the dominant operational expense once a model is deployed, and locking in purpose-built capacity at a fixed long-term rate is a hedge against both power price inflation and GPU supply constraints. The risk is the flip side: a 20-year lease signed in 2026 for infrastructure that doesn't come online until 2027 or 2028 is a bet that the compute architecture Anthropic needs in 2030 still looks like what it needs today. That's a long time in this industry to assume nothing structural changes.

Sources cited:
- TeraWulf Form 8-K (SEC filing, July 6, 2026) (https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0001083301/000110465926080583/tm2619468d1_ex99-1.htm)
- CNBC (https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/06/anthropic-terawulf-data-center-ai.html)
- SiliconANGLE (https://siliconangle.com/2026/07/06/anthropic-inks-19b-ai-data-center-lease-terawulf/)
- Quartz (https://qz.com/anthropic-terawulf-kentucky-data-center-lease-070626)
- Hoodline (https://hoodline.com/2026/07/rural-kentucky-river-town-snags-anthropic-s-19-billion-data-center-deal/)
- Commercial Property Executive (https://www.commercialsearch.com/news/anthropic-to-occupy-401-mw-kentucky-data-center-campus/)
- Data Center Dynamics (https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/anthropic-signs-19bn-20-year-lease-for-kentucky-data-center-with-terawulf/)