Anthropic signed a 20-year lease on Monday to use a TeraWulf data center in Hawesville, Kentucky, about an hour southwest of Louisville. The facility will have capacity of approximately 400 megawatts, with first power delivery expected in the second half of 2027, according to CNBC.
The lease is expected to generate around $19 billion in revenue for TeraWulf over the initial term. TeraWulf shares surged more than 16% in premarket trading on the announcement.
“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, according to CNBC.
Crypto Miner to AI Landlord
TeraWulf is a cryptocurrency mining company that has pivoted to AI data center infrastructure. Its stock is up more than 80% year-to-date. The company also sold its 50% interest in a 168-megawatt data center in Abernathy, Texas to an investor group led by Fluidstack, according to the CNBC report. The pivot mirrors a broader pattern: crypto miners with existing power contracts and facility expertise are repositioning as AI infrastructure providers, capitalizing on the surge in demand for GPU compute capacity.
A 20-Year Bet on Inference Demand
The lease duration is notable. A 20-year commitment from an AI company that is five years old implies Anthropic expects stable, high-volume demand for Claude inference for decades. For context, the entire modern deep learning era is roughly 12 years old, starting from AlexNet in 2012.
The 400-megawatt capacity points to production inference at scale rather than training. Anthropic’s Claude models power the company’s API, Claude Code, Claude Managed Agents, and the recently launched Claude Science Beta. Each of these products generates sustained inference workload that scales with user adoption.
Implications for Claude Availability
For enterprises and developers building on Claude, the TeraWulf lease signals geographic redundancy and potential cost optimization. Kentucky-based inference infrastructure adds a U.S. compute node outside the major cloud regions, which may improve latency for certain workloads and reduces concentration risk.
The $19 billion revenue figure over 20 years implies roughly $950 million annually in hosting costs for Anthropic at this single facility. Combined with the company’s existing cloud partnerships, this represents a significant long-term infrastructure commitment at a time when other AI companies are still debating whether current capex levels are sustainable.