The AI boom keeps minting unlikely winners. TeraWulf, a company that until recently mined bitcoin, has signed a long-term deal to house the computing power behind Anthropic, the maker of the Claude chatbot, sending its shares sharply higher. The agreement is a 20-year lease at a data campus in Kentucky, expected to generate about $19 billion in revenue for TeraWulf over its life, Data Center Dynamics reported.
What the deal is
It is important to be precise about that $19 billion: it is the total rent TeraWulf expects to collect across the two decades of the lease, not an upfront payment or a valuation. Anthropic is leasing capacity at TeraWulf's "Justified Data Campus" in Hawesville, Kentucky, which is being built to supply roughly 401 megawatts of power for computing, Data Center Dynamics reported. The first capacity is expected to come online in the second half of 2027, with the full build-out targeted for early 2028.
Alongside the lease, TeraWulf sold its half-stake in a separate Texas data center to an investor group led by Fluidstack for about $530 million, Data Center Dynamics reported, raising cash to fund its AI expansion.
The market reaction
Investors moved quickly. TeraWulf's stock jumped more than 16% in early trading and is now up more than 80% for the year, CNBC reported. The appeal is the length and certainty of the income: two decades of contracted rent from a major AI company, the kind of steady cash flow that is a world away from the boom-and-bust of crypto mining. Shares of other "neocloud" companies rose as well, on the read-through that demand for their capacity is strong.
What a 'neocloud' is, and why miners fit
A "neocloud" is a new breed of cloud provider built specifically to rent out AI computing power, the clusters of graphics chips (GPUs) used to train and run AI models, rather than the general-purpose computing offered by the likes of Amazon and Microsoft. Several of these firms, TeraWulf among them, grew out of cryptocurrency mining. That is not a coincidence: miners already owned the two things AI data centers need most, large, cheap supplies of electricity and the sites and expertise to run power-hungry hardware. Swapping mining chips for AI GPUs turned out to be a natural pivot.
Why it matters
The deal is a vivid example of the scramble reshaping the AI industry: the binding constraint is increasingly power and physical space, not just chips or talent. AI companies, rather than wait years to build their own data centers, are signing long leases to secure "powered" capacity now, and firms that control electricity and sites can command large, long-dated contracts for it. That is the same force behind other recent moves, including Anthropic's separately reported plan to line up gigawatts of data-center capacity in Australia.
For TeraWulf, the lease is a validation of a risky bet: abandoning the volatile economics of bitcoin for the steadier business of powering artificial intelligence. Whether the wider enthusiasm for neocloud stocks proves durable will depend on whether AI demand keeps growing fast enough to fill all the capacity now being built, but for this company, on this day, the market's verdict was emphatic.
