TeraWulf built its business mining bitcoin. On Monday it signed a 20-year lease handing Anthropic up to 401 megawatts of AI computing capacity at a purpose-built campus in Hawesville, Kentucky — a deal worth roughly $19 billion in contracted revenue, with two five-year renewal options that could keep the AI lab on the site until 2047. TeraWulf’s stock jumped more than 10%.
The economics say who needs whom. TeraWulf expects to spend $3 billion to $4 billion building the campus — less than a fifth of the lease’s value — and Anthropic’s payments are backed by investment-grade credit, handing a former crypto miner a revenue stream that reads more like a sovereign bond than a tech contract. The catch: first capacity doesn’t come online until the second half of 2027, and the full 401 megawatts isn’t finished until early 2028. Anthropic just locked up two decades of power it can’t plug into for another 18 months.
It’s the latest addition to a compute portfolio that already spans multi-gigawatt deals with Amazon, Google and Broadcom and a $50 billion US infrastructure buildout. Anthropic’s run-rate revenue crossed $30 billion this year, up from roughly $9 billion at the end of 2025, and the company has said it will cover local electricity price increases its data centers cause. The bottleneck was never demand, and it was never money. It’s megawatts — and they take years to pour.
Our take: Remember why Fable 5 came off Claude subscriptions last week — “as capacity allows,” with no date attached. This is what that sentence looks like as a term sheet. When the strongest lab in the business is renting 401 megawatts from a bitcoin miner and pre-paying into the 2040s, “temporary” scarcity is really a construction schedule measured in years. The bigger tell: frontier AI has quietly become a power-and-real-estate business, and some of the biggest winners may be whoever sits on cheap electricity and permitted land — not whoever writes the best model. Meta is already trying to rent out its machines. Watch which “miners” get repriced next.
What to watch
- The 2027 delivery date. Capacity lands in phases starting late 2027. Any slip stretches the Fable squeeze — Anthropic’s own CEO has warned that on data-center timing, being “off by a couple of years can be ruinous.”
- The miner-to-landlord trade. TeraWulf had already locked about $12.8 billion in AI hosting revenue with Google-backed Fluidstack and Core42 before this; Anthropic more than doubles that in one signature. Every crypto miner sitting on power and land is now an AI-infrastructure story.
- Who backstops the debt. TeraWulf’s earlier expansion leaned on a $3.2 billion Google backstop and a 14% Google stake. A $19 billion lease needs financing too; the guarantor behind it will show how much risk hyperscalers will absorb to keep the neoclouds building.