TeraWulf said Monday it has signed a twenty-year lease with Anthropic for a purpose-built AI data center campus in Hawesville, Kentucky, calling the site the Justified Data Campus. Contracted revenue is about $19 billion. The site is a former aluminum smelter, 790 acres, wired for 401 megawatts of critical IT load at full buildout. Initial capacity comes online in the back half of 2027. Full capacity is expected by early 2028. TeraWulf is putting in $3 to $4 billion of the construction cost. The stock closed up 4.8 percent.
The reason a company standing up 400 megawatts of AI compute buys a former aluminum smelter is not the smelter. It is the substation. Aluminum plants are power sinks. They get built next to grid interconnect that can already deliver hundreds of megawatts of load on day one, which is the single scarcest resource in AI infrastructure right now. Building a new substation from scratch runs three to seven years. Former smelter sites skip the queue. This is why every heavy-industrial husk from western Kentucky to the Ohio Valley is currently being pitched to hyperscalers by somebody in a hi-vis vest.
The other deal landed the same day, and it is the one worth pairing. TeraWulf sold its 50.1 percent stake in the Abernathy, Texas facility, another 168 megawatts, to Fluidstack for $450 million. Anthropic has been in a US data center partnership with Fluidstack since November 2025. So on the same day, Anthropic added 401 megawatts of direct Kentucky lease and quietly extended its reach into Fluidstack’s Texas footprint. That is not a coincidence. That is a company finishing an infrastructure map.
Read against the earlier Google-Broadcom multi-gigawatt commitment and the Samsung custom-chip talks reported last week, the picture is a lab that is no longer procuring like a lab. Compute is being sourced across vendors, silicon is being negotiated across foundries, and power is being pinned to former industrial sites in states with cheap grid capacity. The campus uses closed-loop propylene glycol cooling so it does not depend on local water. Every part of the stack is being handled separately and deliberately. The word “startup” is now doing a lot of heavy lifting when it appears in the same sentence as Anthropic.