Data WULF JUL 08, 2026

TeraWulf lands $19B, 20-year Anthropic lease; WULF jumps past $12B cap

Claude-maker takes 401 MW at the Hawesville, Kentucky campus; TeraWulf simultaneously exits its Abernathy JV to Fluidstack for about $530M.

BY LINH VINH · DATA INFRASTRUCTURE

TeraWulf signed a 20-year lease with Anthropic on Monday for roughly 401 megawatts of critical IT load at its Justified Data campus in Hawesville, Kentucky, contracting approximately $19 billion of revenue over the initial term. The headline number, per CoinDesk, exceeds the miner’s roughly $12 billion market capitalization outright. WULF jumped more than 16% in premarket per CNBC, with Reuters clocking gains above 10% in early trading. The stock is now up more than 80% year-to-date.

Paul Prager, TeraWulf’s chairman and CEO, framed the deal in the language of institutional graduation: “The Anthropic lease validates our strategy and establishes a long-duration revenue stream with one of the world’s leading AI companies.”

The physical story is worth pausing on. The Hawesville site is a former aluminum processing facility TeraWulf acquired in February for $200 million, per Data Center Dynamics. Aluminum smelters are the classic legacy substrate for hyperscale AI buildouts because they come pre-wired for gigawatt-scale draw. Initial capacity is slated for the second half of 2027, with the full 401 MW ramping by early 2028. In February, management had told investors to expect a major customer commitment by around the end of Q2 2026. They landed it, roughly on schedule.

Simultaneously, TeraWulf is selling its 50.1% interest in the Abernathy joint venture, a 168 MW campus in Abernathy, Texas, to its partner Fluidstack for about $530 million. CoinDesk pegs invested capital there at roughly $450 million, monetized at a premium. The JV was formed in October 2025. Round-trip: nine months.

The broader pattern is now legible. As of March 2026, per CoinDesk, Bitcoin miners had shed more than 15,000 coins from peak holdings and signed over $70 billion in AI computing contracts. Anthropic itself is building parallel capacity with SpaceX/xAI’s Colossus 1 lease, which Data Center Dynamics values at $1.25 billion per month. The frontier labs aren’t sourcing power. They’re absorbing every megawatt with a substation attached to it, and the miners who bought the substations are the marginal sellers.

Sources

About the author

Linh Vinh

DATA INFRASTRUCTURE

Linh Vinh covers vector databases, retrieval, feature stores, and the plumbing layer of enterprise AI. She has been writing about data infrastructure for several years and files on infra vendor consolidation, pricing pressure, and technical architecture shifts.