Anthropic to Lease $19 Billion Kentucky Data Center for 20 Years

Anthropic has signed a 20-year data center lease deal worth $19 billion with US company TeraWulf. The facility is being built on the site of a former steel mill in Hawesville, Kentucky, with the news announced on July 6, 2026.

Until recently, TeraWulf was known mainly for bitcoin mining. The deal with Anthropic marks another step in the company's transformation into an AI computing infrastructure provider, a shift increasingly embraced by former crypto miners who already have power and transmission infrastructure in place.

Why a former steel mill

The choice of Hawesville as a location is no accident. The former steel mill site already has existing power transmission infrastructure and fiber-optic connections, significantly cutting the time and cost of building a data center compared with starting from scratch. The 790-acre campus is designed to eventually handle an IT load of around 401 megawatts.

The timeline calls for an initial, partial capacity to come online in the second half of 2027, with full 401 MW capacity not reached until 2028. That timeline is typical of the current wave of AI infrastructure investment: companies like Anthropic, OpenAI and Microsoft are signing multi-year contracts for capacity that won't physically exist for a year or two.

The math for TeraWulf

For TeraWulf, the economics of the deal look favorable. The company will invest $3 billion to $4 billion in construction, less than a fifth of the $19 billion in revenue guaranteed by the contract. The gap is covered by the structure of the long-term lease, under which Anthropic pays for reserved computing capacity regardless of how quickly it actually puts it to use.

Alongside the Anthropic announcement, TeraWulf sold a 50.1 percent stake in another of its facilities, in Abernathy, Texas, to Fluidstack for $450 million. Fluidstack, previously a joint-venture partner on the project, took majority control of the investment. The market reacted positively to both announcements: TeraWulf shares gained 4.8 percent.

The race for megawatts

Anthropic's deal with TeraWulf fits a broader trend in which leading AI model providers are locking in access to electricity and computing power years in advance, often through multi-year contracts with companies that aren't traditional data center operators. Rather than building their own facilities from scratch, AI labs are increasingly leasing existing or under-development power infrastructure, paying well in advance for reserved capacity.

For the Polish market, the direct impact of this deal is limited, but the direction matters: the cost of building AI computing infrastructure in the US is rising by billions of dollars a year for a single company, which affects the price of access to models and the pace of their development outside the United States as well. The more computing power giants like Anthropic reserve for themselves, the harder it becomes for smaller players to secure comparable access to resources.

The contract also shows that the market is increasingly willing to value former crypto miners as potential AI infrastructure providers, provided they have the right power connections. Investors' reaction (TeraWulf's share price rose nearly 5 percent on the day of the announcement) confirms that the market treats such contracts as a credible signal of revenue for years to come.

Sources: Anthropic inks $19B AI data center lease with TeraWulf (siliconangle.com), TeraWulf jumps on $19 billion data center lease deal with Anthropic (tradingview.com)