Anthropic Signs 20-Year Lease for Kentucky Data Campus

TeraWulf said on July 6, 2026 that it signed a 20-year lease with Anthropic for a purpose-built AI infrastructure campus at the Justified Data site in Hawesville, Kentucky. The company says the lease covers about 401 MW of critical IT load and is expected to generate about $19 billion of contracted revenue over the initial term. TeraWulf expects initial capacity in the second half of 2027 and a ramp to full campus capacity by early 2028.

The deal sits alongside TeraWulf's plan to sell its majority interest in the Abernathy joint venture to a Fluidstack-led investor group, freeing capital for wholly owned infrastructure projects. Reuters, CNBC, and other financial outlets framed the announcement as another sign that former crypto-mining operators and specialized campus developers are repositioning around AI workloads.

For ML infrastructure buyers, the key tradeoff is predictable capacity versus contractual and geographic lock-in. Long-duration campus leases can make large training schedules and inference fleets easier to plan, but they also bind teams to specific power markets, cooling assumptions, latency profiles, and operational partners.

The critical milestones are grid interconnection, permitting, cooling buildout, and any disclosed power-sourcing agreements that support the 2027-2028 schedule. Comparable leases from other AI labs would make this less like a one-off transaction and more like a procurement shift toward contracted AI campuses.