Anthropic’s 20-year lease gives TeraWulf a customer for 401 megawatts of future AI infrastructure, but rent starts only after delivery and the proposed utility deal passes power and grid costs to TeraWulf, leaving financing and project margin unresolved.
Anthropic has supplied a customer commitment for TeraWulf’s planned 401-megawatt AI campus in Hawesville, Kentucky. What the agreement does not yet reveal is the project’s margin: the tenant rent is described in aggregate, while TeraWulf’s power, financing and construction costs remain variable or incomplete.
TeraWulf said in its July 6 announcement that Anthropic signed a 20-year lease for a purpose-built campus at the former Century Aluminum site. Initial capacity is expected in the second half of 2027, with the full 401 megawatts of critical IT load available by early 2028.
The company later said in written responses collected by local reporters that the approximately $19 billion assumes full buildout and operations. TeraWulf’s regulatory filing adds an important timing condition: Anthropic starts paying rent when each applicable premises is delivered. The 20-year term runs from that delivery, and Anthropic can extend it through two successive five-year options.
That makes $19 billion an expected stream of contracted gross revenue, not present value, cash on hand or profit. The lease is expected to have investment-grade credit support, but the announcement and filing do not identify the supporter or disclose the support terms. An independent analysis noted that Anthropic had not yet turned a profit. That does not establish that it cannot perform; it makes the unidentified backstop economically important. Anthropic’s long commitment reduces demand risk only to the extent that the premises are built and the credit structure performs.
TeraWulf paired the lease with a sale of its entire 50.1% interest in the 168-megawatt Abernathy joint venture in Texas. The company will receive about $530 million in three installments through April 2027 after investing roughly $450 million, according to an account based on the filing. The sale brings capital into projects TeraWulf owns directly, but the proceeds cover only part of the scale described for Hawesville.
In the proposed utility filing, TeraWulf estimated its own investment at $3.5 billion to $4 billion, with more than $10 billion to be invested by a data-center tenant. Separately, a financial analysis put TeraWulf’s first-quarter revenue at $34 million, its net loss at $427.63 million, cash and restricted cash at about $3.1 billion, and long-term debt at roughly the same amount. Those figures do not establish a funding gap by themselves, but they show why the final credit support and construction financing matter.
The former smelter gives TeraWulf infrastructure that is difficult to reproduce quickly. Big Rivers Electric said in its proposed electric-service agreement that it has continued to maintain 482 megawatts of transmission capacity at Hawesville since the smelter closed in 2022. The property also came with five 161-kilovolt circuits, an energized substation and access to the regional transmission network, local reporting said.
That existing infrastructure shortens one bottleneck; it does not give TeraWulf a fixed electricity price. Under the proposal, Big Rivers would procure energy and capacity in the MISO markets. TeraWulf would bear the market charges and credits, transmission and congestion costs, capacity obligations, regulatory costs, credit-support costs and the expense of any new facilities required for service. The wholesale and distribution adders are redacted from the public agreement, so the available record cannot show the spread between Anthropic’s rent and TeraWulf’s power-related expense.
The power contract also has a different initial duration from the tenant lease. Its first term runs for 15 years after construction completion, compared with Anthropic’s 20 years after delivery. The power deal then renews automatically in five-year increments unless a party gives two years’ notice. One renewal could bridge the stated terms, but that is not the same as a 20-year initial power commitment.
For its first six years, the contract requires TeraWulf to take or pay for 482 megawatts. It requires collateral equal to twice the estimated highest monthly bill, plus prepayment or separate credit support for a full planning year of capacity. Any new grid facilities must be funded through a TeraWulf deposit and trued up to actual cost.
Those provisions materially limit the risk shifted to other electricity customers. The contract says TeraWulf is not to be subsidized by Big Rivers or Kenergy, and it lets the utilities curtail the campus during specified reliability events. The sequence matters: customers already on interruptible rates would be curtailed first; TeraWulf could then be curtailed before other, non-interruptible rural load during a MISO Energy Emergency Alert Level 3 or when needed for system integrity.
The agreement is not effective until required approvals are obtained from the utilities, Kentucky regulators, MISO and the Rural Utilities Service, among other conditions. A party may terminate if those conditions are not fulfilled or waived within 18 months, or if construction completion does not occur within three years after the agreement becomes effective.
TeraWulf acquired the 750-acre former aluminum complex for $200 million in February; local reporting described 250 acres as buildable. An industry project report said Fluor was selected to lead construction and put the project at about $4 billion. The inherited grid connection and industrial footprint are the central strategic assets.
They do not make the conversion automatic or unique. Industry reporting cautioned that converting a bitcoin-mining site into an AI data center is not a plug-and-play process even when a miner already controls land and grid access. Across the sector, former bitcoin miners have been making the same shift toward longer AI contracts as mining economics became more volatile. By March 2026, miners had signed more than $70 billion of AI-computing contracts, according to a market analysis.
Anthropic is diversified on the other side of the lease. It had already committed to rent more than 10 gigawatts of servers through arrangements involving Google, Amazon Web Services, Akamai, CoreWeave and Fluidstack, and it had also agreed to lease xAI facilities, according to an industry account. Hawesville is therefore one large component of Anthropic’s broader infrastructure procurement, while Anthropic is the sole customer for the initial 401-megawatt Kentucky campus.
That imbalance concentrates tenant, delivery and financing exposure at TeraWulf even as Anthropic spreads its compute demand. It also explains the market’s mixed first reaction: TeraWulf shares rose as much as 19% on July 6 but finished up about 4%, with a market value around $12 billion. Comparing that valuation with $19 billion of future gross revenue is visually striking but economically incomplete.
The old smelter’s closure eliminated more than 600 jobs, according to interviews with residents. TeraWulf’s estimate in the utility filing is 80 to 100 permanent jobs and 800 to 1,000 construction jobs at the peak. It also projected about $7 million a year in school taxes and a $14.5 million annual state sales-tax impact, both dependent on MISO market pricing.
The permanent workforce is therefore much smaller than the industrial workforce Hawesville lost, even if the construction and tax estimates are realized. Residents have also asked for details about electricity use, water, noise and infrastructure. A petition seeking a pause until the project’s impacts were disclosed had attracted more than 1,200 signatures, local reporting said.
TeraWulf said in its written responses that it plans closed-loop cooling to reduce water use during normal operations, environmental remediation of the former industrial site, sound studies and local hiring where possible. Those are company plans, not operating measurements. They will become testable as permitting, remediation, hiring and construction proceed.
Kentucky expanded tax exemptions for qualifying data centers, while a proposal intended to protect ratepayers from subsidizing energy upgrades failed before the legislative session ended in April. The utility contract addresses many direct cost-allocation concerns through pass-throughs, collateral and customer-funded facilities. It does not resolve the separate questions of whether projected jobs and taxes arrive or how the completed campus affects its surroundings.
Kentucky regulators suspended the proposed retail electric-service agreement for five months, through October 13, while they examine whether it is reasonable. At the research cutoff, the commission docket scheduled a local public-comment meeting for July 27 and set July 28 as the deadline for Big Rivers or an intervenor to request a hearing or a decision on the existing record.
Four developments will determine whether the $19 billion headline becomes a profitable operating business:
The lease answers who would occupy Hawesville. Approval, financing and operating data must still answer the harder question: how much of the promised revenue TeraWulf can convert into durable cash flow.
Zhipu reportedly reached $1 billion in annual recurring revenue in July, roughly four times a March estimate, but the unconfirmed run rate is not annual sales and still sits far ahead of recognized cloud revenue while margins remain thin.
OpenAI has put conversations and Projects back in its redesigned ChatGPT desktop app and enabled cloud Work threads to move across devices, correcting the launch's biggest usability failures without merging local Work or Codex histories.
Twenty-nine countries signed an agreement creating WAICO as an independent intergovernmental organization, while China paired the launch with capacity-building offers that are not yet confirmed as WAICO programs.
Meta reportedly plans to put departing AWS compute executive Dave Brown to work on its data-center buildout, adding hyperscale operating experience while leaving any customer-facing cloud business conditional and undefined.
Moonshot AI has made Kimi K3 available through its apps and API, pairing a 2.8-trillion-parameter architecture with early frontier-level results, but the model's open-weight claim cannot be tested until its weights and technical report arrive.
CIA Director John Ratcliffe said US intelligence is consistent with an estimate that Russian recruits last 20 to 30 minutes on Ukraine’s battlefield, but the public trail leads to an unsourced claim about assault troops and does not establish a representative average.
China has paired a five-year AI training offer for developing countries with cooperation centers, a weather-warning rollout and a new 29-country organization. The package gives Beijing a platform for influence, but no budget, selection rules or delivery timetable has been published.
Nebius has arranged its first senior secured facility against an operating GPU deployment and one customer’s cash flows. The deal adds project-level debt to its expansion toolkit, but an unnamed customer and a larger rival financing limit what it proves about the rest of Nebius’s backlog.
Huawei publicly displayed a 16-cabinet Atlas 950 configuration rated at 1 EFLOPS in FP8, providing tangible evidence of its system-scale AI strategy while leaving price, power use and sustained workload performance undisclosed ahead of the full system's planned fourth-quarter release.
UK testing places leading open-weight models four to seven months behind selected closed-model cyber results, yet longer attack chains, U.S. benchmarks and mixed cost comparisons show why that interval is a warning signal rather than a universal capability clock.
Moonshot AI's Kimi K3 added to a global technology selloff with near-frontier performance, but unreleased weights, mixed cost comparisons and a recommended 64-accelerator deployment leave its effect on chip demand unresolved.
Two binding EU decisions require Google to give rival AI services comparable access to 11 Android features and offer eligible search competitors a restricted, anonymized dataset, but phased deadlines, certification, pricing and privacy safeguards leave the competitive effect unproven.
Databricks has signed a term sheet for a Coatue-led financing at a $188 billion valuation, while unidentified sources put the round at $3 billion. The proposed capital would deepen its push into AI governance, data agents and operational databases, but the transaction remains open and the company supplied no new operating figures.
OpenAI says a handful of GPT-5.6 Sol file-deletion reports most commonly involved Full Access without sandboxing or Auto-review. Its own evaluations show a more complicated risk picture, and the company has not yet published an incident rate or evidence that its promised safeguards stop the failure.
Netflix says generative AI workflows were used on roughly 300 titles in 2026, but its only quantified example tied to that disclosure covers 17 minutes and does not establish how much finished material, spending or labor changed across the slate.
A rogue browser extension can trigger Claude for Chrome’s fixed Gmail, Docs, Calendar and business workflows; the attack is constrained by default approvals but can run silently for users who enabled unattended action.
Gemini 3.5 Pro missed its expected June rollout. An anonymous-source account says a late-June data change fell short of Google's coding goals, but Google has confirmed only partner testing—not the reported cause, a new date, or public results and pricing.
Gold Eagle has begun collecting and prioritizing AI-discovered software vulnerabilities, but the voluntary federal clearinghouse has not disclosed results, operating rules or the resources that would turn findings into deployed fixes.
Google is bringing Gemini Omni editing and a reusable face-and-voice avatar to Vids, but the sharper distinction is account-level identity across Vids and Gemini rather than a new category of AI video; Vids already offered Veo generation and customizable avatars, while specialist rivals already sell digital presenters.
Sunday Robotics says Memo folded and stacked garments successfully in 778 of 785 attempts across unseen homes without per-home adaptation, but the internal test covers one bounded chore and leaves price, support needs and reliability beyond laundry unanswered.