Anthropic PBC has agreed to a $19 billion lease for a data center currently being constructed by TeraWulf Inc., a Nasdaq-listed company specializing in AI infrastructure. The lease spans two decades and involves a campus on a former aluminum smelting site in Kentucky, featuring existing power and fiber-optic infrastructure that will accelerate the project's completion.
The site covers 790 acres and aims to bring initial computing capacity online in the second half of 2027, with full operation expected in 2028. Once complete, the facility will deliver 401 megawatts of power dedicated to AI workloads. An advanced closed-loop cooling system will manage heat from the facility’s graphics processing units, reusing a propylene glycol-water mixture instead of drawing from local water sources.
TeraWulf expects significant returns from this venture, having planned an investment between $3 billion and $4 billion into the data center’s buildout, a fraction of the lease’s value. The announcement boosted TeraWulf shares by nearly 5%. Details on the AI chips Anthropic will deploy remain undisclosed, though rumors suggest a potential partnership with Samsung Electronics for custom inference accelerators, alongside chips from Nvidia, AMD, and Google currently used by Anthropic.
Besides the Kentucky project, TeraWulf disclosed plans to sell its majority share of a 168-megawatt AI data center in Abernathy, Texas, to partner Fluidstack for $450 million. Last year, Anthropic also partnered with Fluidstack to establish a U.S. network of AI-focused data centers, underscoring its expansive strategy in AI infrastructure.