TeraWulf announces 20-year lease with Anthropic at Justified Data campus

TeraWulf, the Maryland-based infrastructure company that started life mining bitcoin, has landed the kind of deal that reshapes a balance sheet overnight. Anthropic has agreed to lease compute capacity at TeraWulf's Justified Data campus in Hawesville, Kentucky, for 20 years, a contract the company pegs at roughly $19 billion in revenue over its initial term. That's not a typo, and it's not a modest side deal either. It's the sort of number that turns a power-and-real-estate operator into a long-term landlord for the AI boom.

The campus itself is still mostly on paper. It's designed to hold about 401 megawatts of critical IT load, built out in phases, with the first chunk of capacity coming online in the second half of 2027 and the full site ramping by early 2028. So this is a bet on 2028 and beyond, not a quick win. CEO Paul Prager had told investors back in February, when TeraWulf first announced the Justified Data acquisition, that a major customer commitment was coming by roughly mid-2026. This lease is that commitment landing almost exactly on schedule, which is rare enough in infrastructure deals that it's worth pointing out.

While that deal was closing, TeraWulf was also cashing out of a different bet. The company sold its 50.1% stake in the Abernathy Joint Venture, a 168-megawatt data center project in Texas it had been building with Fluidstack since 2025, to an investor group led by Fluidstack itself. TeraWulf had put in about $450 million and is walking away with a premium on that, plus a cleaner balance sheet since it no longer has to account for the joint venture. Fluidstack keeps running the project going forward.

The logic connecting both moves is straightforward: TeraWulf wants to own and operate its own AI infrastructure outright rather than split economics with partners. Selling Abernathy frees up capital that can go straight into wholly owned campuses like Justified Data, where TeraWulf controls the customer relationship and captures more of the long-term value. It's a shift from being a co-developer to being the landlord holding a 20-year, investment-grade-backed lease with one of the most well-funded AI labs on the planet.

What's notable here isn't just the size of the Anthropic number, it's the timeline. Twenty years is an eternity in AI infrastructure terms, given how fast compute demands and chip generations turn over. Anthropic is essentially betting that its need for dedicated power and data center capacity in Kentucky will still make sense in the mid-2040s. That's either a sign of extreme confidence in AI's staying power, or evidence that long-duration leases are simply what it now costs to guarantee power and space in a market where every AI company is fighting for the same scarce electrons.