TeraWulf announced a 20-year computing power lease with Anthropic valued at approximately $19 billion, the largest publicly disclosed infrastructure commitment in the AI buildout to date. The contract delivers $950 million in annual revenue assuming linear deployment, though actual cashflows will follow construction milestones at TeraWulf's Lake Mariner facility in upstate New York. The stock moved 47% in morning trading before settling 34% higher at close.
The company began life as a bitcoin miner in 2021, went public via SPAC at $10 per share, then traded below $1 through most of 2023 as proof-of-work economics deteriorated. Management pivoted to hyperscale data center infrastructure in Q4 2023, retrofitting mining facilities with liquid cooling and high-density rack configurations suitable for AI training clusters. This Anthropic lease represents the first contracted validation of that repositioning. TeraWulf's current market capitalization sits near $600 million, making the contract value roughly 30 times enterprise value at yesterday's close.
The deal matters because it establishes price discovery for long-duration compute leases in a market where most capacity still trades on quarterly commits or vague letters of intent. Anthropic is paying for future capacity TeraWulf has not yet built, effectively financing construction through prepayment structures embedded in the contract. The 20-year term extends well beyond typical hyperscale leases, which run 3 to 7 years, and implies Anthropic expects model training costs to remain economically viable at these power densities through at least 2045. That assumption only holds if improvement rates in model efficiency fail to outpace growth in training scope, a bet against algorithmic deflation.
For allocators, this contract separates infrastructure plays with actual signed capacity from speculative data center REITs trading on projected utilization. TeraWulf now has a named counterparty, a fixed revenue schedule, and a construction roadmap that can be underwritten against Anthropic's capital position. The company disclosed 150 megawatts of current capacity and plans to scale to 570 megawatts by 2027, with the Anthropic lease consuming the majority of that expansion. Anthropic closed a $7.3 billion Series D in March 2025 and maintains access to a $4 billion credit facility from a consortium including Menlo Ventures and Fidelity, providing reasonable confidence in lease performance through at least the first buildout phase.
The contract also clarifies the bid for nuclear-adjacent data center sites. TeraWulf's Lake Mariner facility sits 12 miles from the Nine Mile Point nuclear station and sources power through direct agreements with Talen Energy, avoiding grid congestion that has delayed other AI infrastructure projects by 18 to 24 months. Anthropic's willingness to lock this specific site suggests the AI labs are now competing on power access timelines, not just chip allocation. Operators should track whether this triggers a repricing of similar nuclear-proximate assets, particularly sites within 15 miles of uprated reactors in Pennsylvania and Illinois.
TeraWulf management guided to $200 million in capital expenditures over the next 18 months to fulfill initial lease milestones, with the majority financed through project-level debt that Anthropic's contract now makes bankable. The first revenue recognition begins in Q1 2026, assuming permitting and utility interconnection proceed on schedule. Watch for Anthropic's compute consumption rates in their next model release, expected late Q2 2025, which will indicate whether the lease sizing reflects actual training needs or includes strategic overbuying to block competitor access to this specific power corridor.