Anthropic secures 20-year lease for new AI data center on former smelter site in Kentucky, marking a major capacity expansion by the leading AI model developer.
Anthropic is building a data center on the 750-acre footprint of a shuttered aluminium smelter in Kentucky, after TeraWulf announced a 20-year lease expected to generate roughly $19 billion in contracted revenue.
TeraWulf, which pivoted from Bitcoin mining to AI infrastructure development, signed the agreement with Anthropic on Monday. The facility, formally named the Justified Data Campus, is located in Hawesville—a city of around 1,000 people on the Ohio River—and will be built on the site of Century Aluminum's smelter, which was idled in 2022.
Century Aluminum sold the Hawesville site to TeraWulf in February 2026, citing the project's potential to bring billions in investment and long-term skilled jobs to the region. The company retained a 6.8% minority equity stake in the redevelopment. The site provides approximately 480 megawatts of existing power availability, bringing TeraWulf's total portfolio capacity to 2.8 gigawatts.
TeraWulf invested approximately $450 million in the Justified Data Campus and plans to redeploy those proceeds into other wholly owned AI infrastructure opportunities, monetizing the asset at a premium to invested capital through the Anthropic lease.
The campus will be developed in phases, initially providing power for AI computing during the second half of 2027 before reaching its full 401-megawatt capacity by early 2028. Spread across 20 years and 401 megawatts of critical IT load, the contract implies approximately $2.4 million per megawatt per year. TeraWulf said the lease is expected to be supported by investment-grade credit.
"The Anthropic lease validates our strategy and establishes a long-duration revenue stream with one of the world's leading AI companies," TeraWulf CEO Paul Prager said. "The deal creates a framework for future expansion and demonstrates the value of our ability to source power, develop infrastructure, and secure long-term customer commitments."
The Hawesville announcement accompanied a separate transaction in which TeraWulf sold its 50.1% majority stake in the Abernathy joint venture—a 168-megawatt AI data center campus in Abernathy, Texas—to an investor group led by Fluidstack for $530 million. Both deals were disclosed simultaneously.
The twin announcements lifted TeraWulf's stock sharply. Shares surged more than 16% in premarket trading on July 7, 2026, and are now up more than 80% year-to-date.
TeraWulf has been expanding its power portfolio beyond Kentucky. The company previously acquired the Morgantown Generating Station in Maryland, a grid-connected facility with approximately 210 megawatts of operational generation capacity across roughly 250 buildable acres, with potential to expand to 1 gigawatt.
For Anthropic, maker of the Claude family of AI models, the Hawesville lease secures a dedicated, purpose-built compute base at scale without the capital burden of ownership. The deal locks in access to 401 megawatts of AI infrastructure for two decades—a commitment that underscores how the race for dedicated power capacity has become as competitive as the race for the models themselves.
Whether TeraWulf can replicate the Justified Data Campus model at its Maryland site or elsewhere will determine whether the $19 billion lease becomes a template or remains a singular achievement.