Anthropic has agreed to a 20-year lease worth an estimated $19 billion with bitcoin miner-turned-AI infrastructure firm TeraWulf, securing computing capacity at a former aluminum smelting site in Hawesville, Kentucky. The 790-acre campus will scale to 401 megawatts of IT capacity, with initial capacity coming online in the second half of 2027 and the full build-out finished by early 2028.
TeraWulf plans to invest $3-4 billion of its own money into the buildout, less than a fifth of the lease's total value, and will use a closed-loop cooling system that mixes water with propylene glycol to avoid straining local water supplies. The site's existing power transmission lines and fiber-optic infrastructure, left over from its industrial past, are expected to speed up construction. TeraWulf shares rose nearly 5% on the news, and the deal adds to Anthropic's broader push past 10 gigawatts of committed server capacity across multiple cloud and infrastructure partners.
For TeraWulf, which posted just $34 million in revenue last quarter, the agreement marks a dramatic pivot from cryptocurrency mining toward AI infrastructure and a major validation of that strategy. The deal follows a wave of similar long-term leases as AI labs race to lock in power and compute capacity years ahead of need.