TeraWulf signed a 20-year lease with Anthropic for a purpose-built AI infrastructure campus on a former industrial site in Kentucky, securing $19 billion in contracted revenue through 2045. The agreement marks the company's formal pivot from cryptocurrency mining to data center landlord, a shift that sent shares up 47% in early trading Monday before settling 34% higher by close.
Anthropic will occupy the entire facility once construction completes in Q4 2025, with initial power delivery of 300 megawatts scaling to 500 megawatts by mid-2027. TeraWulf holds the site lease and will build to Anthropic's specifications, then sublease the campus under a structure that front-loads $2.1 billion in the first five years. The contract includes annual escalators tied to CPI plus 150 basis points, with penalty clauses if power delivery misses contracted milestones by more than 30 days. TeraWulf disclosed it secured $1.8 billion in construction financing from a syndicate led by KeyBanc and Jefferies, with debt covenants requiring minimum liquidity of $200 million through the build phase.
The deal solves two problems. Anthropic needs sovereign compute independent of hyperscaler partnerships—Google holds a board seat and committed $2 billion in 2023, but Claude's training runs now exceed what shared GCP capacity can reliably deliver during peak cycles. TeraWulf, which reported $48 million in Bitcoin mining revenue last quarter, faced margin compression as network difficulty climbed 22% year-over-year and power costs in its Pennsylvania and New York facilities rose above $0.06 per kilowatt-hour. The company will idle 80% of its mining rigs by June, redeploying that power capacity and using the Anthropic contract to refinance $340 million in legacy mining debt at 9.5% interest.
This is the fourth $10 billion-plus AI infrastructure deal announced in February, following Oracle's $15 billion commitment to expand its Gen2 cloud in Arizona, Microsoft's $12 billion lease with Equinix for European GPU clusters, and a $10.5 billion joint venture between Nvidia and Brookfield to build AI-optimized data centers across three continents. The pattern is clear: frontier labs are locking in dedicated capacity with contract terms that shift capital risk onto infrastructure operators, while those operators accept the risk in exchange for revenue visibility that lets them refinance expensive legacy positions. TeraWulf's agreement includes a clause allowing Anthropic to sublease up to 30% of the campus to third parties after year seven, with TeraWulf retaining approval rights and taking 15% of sublease revenue.
Operators should track TeraWulf's construction execution through its quarterly filings—any delay beyond Q4 2025 triggers penalty payments of $8 million per month and gives Anthropic the right to renegotiate pricing after 90 days of missed delivery. The company's next earnings call is scheduled for May 8, where management will detail the syndicate's disbursement schedule and whether it secured additional mezzanine financing to cover cost overruns. Watch also for Anthropic's compute disclosures in its Series D materials, expected in Q2, which should show whether this lease complements or replaces its existing GCP commitments.
TeraWulf's market cap closed Monday at $3.2 billion, implying the market is pricing in roughly six years of the Anthropic contract with minimal value assigned to the out-years or potential sublease upside. That leaves $11 billion in contracted revenue beyond 2031 unpriced, assuming the facility delivers on time and Anthropic's capital position allows it to meet lease obligations through a full economic cycle.