TeraWulf Secures $19 Billion Lease Deal with Anthropic, Accelerating Shift from Bitcoin to AI Hosting
The 20-year agreement covers a purpose-built campus at TeraWulf's Kentucky site, with 401 megawatts of critical IT load coming online by early 2028, and the bitcoin miner's shares jumped more than 10% on the news.
TeraWulf announced on Monday that it signed a 20-year lease with Anthropic for data centre infrastructure, a deal expected to generate roughly $19 billion in contracted revenue over its lifetime. The agreement locks in the kind of long-term, recurring AI customer revenue that bitcoin miners have been chasing as they reposition their energy assets away from volatile crypto mining. TeraWulf had flagged in May that AI hosting would increasingly drive its business, and the Anthropic deal turns that pivot into hard numbers.
The lease covers a purpose-built AI infrastructure campus at TeraWulf's Justified Data site in Hawesville, Kentucky. The campus will support about 401 megawatts of critical IT load, with initial capacity expected online in the second half of 2027 and full capacity by early 2028. That timeline puts the project squarely in the window when much of the AI industry's currently planned power capacity is also scheduled to come online, raising the pressure on execution.
Alongside the lease, TeraWulf said it is selling its 50.1% stake in the Abernathy joint venture to an investor group led by partner Fluidstack. The sale monetizes the company's roughly $450 million investment at a premium to invested capital and frees up capital that TeraWulf can redirect toward wholly owned AI infrastructure projects. TeraWulf shares had already gained about 85% year to date before the announcement, and the two moves together signal a clean break from the company's origins as a pure-play bitcoin miner.
BuiltWorld AI Operational Take: A $19 billion lease with a frontier AI lab, signed by a former bitcoin miner, is the clearest signal yet that AI compute hosting has matured into an asset class of its own. The operational play here is speed to full capacity. TeraWulf has to deliver 401 megawatts of AI-grade power in roughly three years, which means the procurement of medium-voltage gear, cooling systems, and grid interconnection upgrades needs to be locked in well before the 2027 deadline. The Abernathy sale also shows that monetizing legacy joint ventures to concentrate capital on wholly owned AI sites is becoming a repeatable financial playbook.