Anthropic Signs $19 Billion, 20-Year Lease for Kentucky Data Center with TeraWulf

AI lab Anthropic has secured a massive long-term lease at TeraWulf’s Justified Data campus in Hawesville, Kentucky, marking one of the largest private data center agreements in the industry. The 20-year lease is expected to generate approximately $19 billion in revenue for TeraWulf over its term, underscoring the escalating demand for dedicated infrastructure by leading artificial intelligence companies.

The Justified Data campus, being developed on a former aluminum processing site that TeraWulf acquired for $200 million in February 2026, will have up to 401MW of IT capacity once fully built out. Initial capacity is slated to come online in the second half of 2027, with the entire campus expected to be operational by early 2028. The site’s transformation from industrial use to AI-ready infrastructure highlights the growing trend of repurposing legacy industrial assets for high-density computing needs.

Paul Prager, chairman and CEO of TeraWulf, said: “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. The timing of today's announcement reflects the completion of final documentation and customary transaction processes, and we are proud to announce this landmark partnership with Anthropic.” He added that the lease “validates our strategy and establishes a long-duration revenue stream with one of the world’s leading AI companies,” providing roughly $19 billion in contracted lease revenue and creating a framework for future expansion.

Anthropic has traditionally relied on cloud providers for its compute capacity, having committed to renting more than 10GW of servers from cloud firms to date. This includes a $200 billion agreement with Google, as well as large-scale deals with Amazon Web Services, CoreWeave, and a $50 billion partnership with AI cloud company Fluidstack. In June 2026, reports emerged that Anthropic had signed more than a dozen letters of intent with data center developers, signaling its aggressive push to secure physical infrastructure beyond cloud arrangements. The company has also signed a separate data center lease with SpaceX/xAI for the entire Colossus 1 facility, valued at $1.25 billion per month, and will lease space in the Colossus II data center.

Separately, TeraWulf announced it is divesting its entire 50.1 percent ownership stake in the “Abernathy Joint Venture,” a partnership with Fluidstack formed in October 2025 to develop a 168MW data center on a 120-acre campus in Abernathy, Texas. TeraWulf has sold its share to an investor group led by Fluidstack, enabling the company to realize the value created by its $450 million investment in the project and redeploy capital elsewhere. Prager noted that the sale “crystallizes the value created through that investment and generates significant capital for redeployment into infrastructure platforms where we maintain direct ownership, customer relationships, and operational control.”

Together, these transactions position TeraWulf for its next phase of growth, with a strategy centered on owning and operating critical infrastructure assets while maintaining direct customer relationships. Fluidstack remains a major customer of TeraWulf’s New York campus outside Buffalo, with Google backstopping Fluidstack’s deals with TeraWulf. The industry implications are significant: as AI labs like Anthropic shift from purely cloud-based models to owning or leasing dedicated data center capacity, developers like TeraWulf are increasingly able to secure long-term, high-value revenue streams, reshaping the data center market toward more direct, infrastructure-heavy partnerships.