An Anthropic Kentucky data center is set to rise on the 750-acre footprint of a shuttered aluminium smelter, 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, sits 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.
From aluminium smelter to Anthropic Kentucky data center
Century Aluminum announced the sale of the Hawesville site to TeraWulf in February 2026, with Century noting the project could bring billions in investment and long-term skilled jobs to the local economy, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Century retained a 6.8% minority equity stake in the redevelopment, and the site carries approximately 480 megawatts of existing power availability, which lifted TeraWulf’s total portfolio capacity to 2.8 gigawatts, according to Spectrum News 1 Kentucky.
TeraWulf invested approximately $450 million in the Justified Data Campus. The company said those proceeds will be redeployed into wholly owned AI infrastructure opportunities, monetising 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 roughly $2.4 million per megawatt per year, according to AI for CRE Collective. TeraWulf also 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. Prager added that 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.’
Texas sale adds further firepower for reinvestment
The Hawesville announcement came alongside a separate transaction: 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, according to the TeraWulf investor relations press release.
The twin announcements gave TeraWulf’s stock a sharp lift. Shares surged more than 16% in premarket trading on 7 July 2026 and are now up more than 80% year-to-date, according to CNBC.
The company has been building out its power portfolio beyond Kentucky. A prior TeraWulf announcement disclosed the acquisition of the Morgantown Generating Station in Maryland, a grid-connected facility with approximately 210 megawatts of operational generation capacity across roughly 250 buildable acres, with the potential to expand to up 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 underlines how the race for dedicated power capacity has become as competitive as the race for the models themselves.
Whether TeraWulf replicates the Justified Data Campus model at its Maryland site or elsewhere will be the next test of whether the $19 billion lease is a template or a one-off.