Anthropic signed a 20-year lease Monday to use a TeraWulf data center in Hawesville, Kentucky, about an hour southwest of Louisville. The facility will have capacity of around 400 megawatts, with first power delivery expected in the second half of 2027.
TeraWulf shares soared more than 16% in premarket trading on the news, according to CNBC. The lease is expected to generate around $19 billion in revenue over the initial term, a figure that represents a major shift in the company's financial profile.
"The Anthropic lease validates our strategy and establishes a long-duration revenue stream with one of the world's leading AI companies," CEO Paul Prager said.
TeraWulf started as a crypto mining company but has pivoted toward AI data center infrastructure. Its stock is up more than 80% in 2026. The Anthropic deal marks one of the most significant milestones in that transition.
Alongside the Anthropic announcement, TeraWulf also sold its 50% interest in a 168-megawatt data center in Abernathy, Texas to an investor group led by Fluidstack. That sale further signals the company's move away from its cryptocurrency origins and toward longer-term, contracted AI infrastructure deals.
Anthropic, one of the leading AI companies competing with OpenAI and Google, has been expanding its computing infrastructure as demand for large language model training and inference continues to grow. Long-term data center leases of this scale are becoming more common as AI companies race to lock in capacity years in advance.
The Hawesville facility's 400-megawatt capacity is substantial. For context, a single large AI training cluster can consume tens of megawatts. Securing that much power under a 20-year agreement gives Anthropic a stable foundation for future model development without depending on shared cloud infrastructure.
The deal lands as data center demand continues to outpace supply across the United States. Power constraints, permitting timelines, and the sheer cost of building new facilities have made existing or in-development sites increasingly valuable. TeraWulf's Kentucky location, with its expected 2027 power delivery date, positions the company at the center of that crunch.
