Anthropic just signed a $19 billion, 20 year lease for a data center built on an old aluminum smelting site

[HiggsField10]

Anthropic has agreed to pay 19 billion dollars to lease a data center from TeraWulf for 20 years, one of the largest single infrastructure commitments the AI company has made to date. TeraWulf, a Nasdaq listed AI infrastructure developer, plans to invest between 3 and 4 billion dollars actually building out the facility, meaning the lease itself is worth roughly five times what TeraWulf needs to spend constructing it

The site itself has a genuinely unusual backstory, a 790 acre campus in Hawesville, Kentucky, built on what used to be an aluminum smelting facility. That industrial history turns out to be a real advantage rather than just a curiosity, the old smelter already has substantial power transmission infrastructure and fiber optic connectivity in place, letting TeraWulf build a data center meaningfully faster than starting on genuinely raw land would allow

TeraWulf shares rose nearly 5 percent on the announcement, and CEO Paul Prager noted the timing reflects a commitment the company had actually signaled back in February, when it first announced acquiring the site and told investors it expected to land a major customer commitment by around the end of the second quarter of 2026. It's not yet clear which chips will actually run inside the facility, Anthropic already uses hardware from Nvidia, AMD and Google, and there have been separate rumors the company might partner with Samsung on a custom inference chip, so this lease is really about locking down the physical building and power capacity rather than committing to a specific hardware stack

The deal is part of a broader wave of similar arrangements happening across the industry at nearly the same time, SpaceX recently signed a compute deal worth up to 6.3 billion dollars with open source AI startup Reflection, and cloud provider Nebius separately agreed to sell over 1 billion dollars of computing capacity to that same startup. Anthropic itself already has a roughly 40 billion dollar compute agreement with Google, meaning this TeraWulf lease pushes the company's total committed compute spend well past 100 billion dollars through the end of the decade, a staggering figure for a company that, like every other frontier lab right now, is fundamentally betting that demand for its models keeps growing fast enough to justify locking in infrastructure this far in advance

Anthropic inks $19B AI data center lease with TeraWulf - SiliconANGLEsiliconangle.com