TeraWulf, a former Bitcoin miner, signed a 20-year lease with Anthropic for its Justified Data campus in Hawesville, Kentucky, generating roughly $19 billion of contracted revenue over the term, per Data Center Dynamics. The site will host about 401 MW of critical IT load, with initial capacity in the second half of 2027 and full buildout by early 2028. TeraWulf stock soared on the announcement, per CoinDesk.
The numbers that frame the deal are the $19 billion of contracted revenue against the $3 to $4 billion TeraWulf plans to invest in the build, less than a fifth of the lease value. That spread is the economics of becoming an AI landlord: own the power interconnect and the land, sign a frontier lab to a two-decade take-or-pay-style commitment, and finance the construction against the contracted cash flow. For Anthropic, the appeal is the mirror image. A 20-year lease keeps roughly $19 billion of compute capacity off its own balance sheet as an operating commitment rather than capex, which matters for a company preparing an IPO where the market will scrutinize how much it owns versus rents.
The structural read is that this is how AI compute now gets financed. The hyperscalers build and own; the frontier labs increasingly lease from specialized operators, many of them former crypto miners sitting on cheap power and industrial sites. TeraWulf bought this campus, a former aluminum smelter, for $200 million in February. The crypto-mining-to-AI-landlord pivot converts stranded power assets into 20-year contracted revenue, and it is becoming one of the cleaner ways to underwrite the AI-infrastructure debt Morgan Stanley pegged near $570 billion this year.
Bottom Line
AI compute is being financed through long-dated leases that move capex off the labs' balance sheets and onto specialized landlords with power and land. Read the lease terms, not just the capex headlines, to size a lab's real infrastructure commitment.