TeraWulf lands $19B Anthropic lease, proving Bitcoin miners are now just AI landlords with better GPUs 🤖

TeraWulf (WULF) shares climbed roughly 14% to $24.05 after the Bitcoin miner disclosed a 20-year, approximately $19 billion lease with AI company Anthropic at its Justified Data campus in Hawesville, Kentucky. The announcement lifted a basket of peers pivoting toward artificial intelligence compute: IREN gained more than 13%, Hut 8 rose 12%, Cipher Digital advanced 11%, and Keel Infrastructure, formerly Bitfarms, which exited Bitcoin mining entirely to focus on AI, was up 10%.

Under the deal announced Monday, Anthropic will occupy the purpose-built campus, which is expected to eventually support about 401 megawatts of computing capacity. The first phase is slated to come online in the second half of 2027, with the site reaching full capacity by early 2028. TeraWulf said the lease is expected to be supported by an investment-grade credit rating. Anthropic, the AI company behind the Claude chatbot, is one of several major players racing to secure long-term power and data center capacity as it scales up its models.

Separately, TeraWulf agreed to sell its 50.1% stake in the Abernathy Joint Venture, a Texas data center project developed with partner Fluidstack, to an investor group led by Fluidstack. The transaction monetizes TeraWulf's roughly $450 million investment at a premium to invested capital, with Fluidstack taking over leadership of the project going forward.

"When we announced the Justified Data campus acquisition in February, we told investors that we expected to secure a major customer commitment by around the end of the second quarter of 2026," said TeraWulf Chairman and CEO Paul Prager in a statement. "The timing of today's announcement reflects the completion of final documentation and customary transaction processes, and we are proud to announce this landmark partnership with Anthropic."

The Maryland-based company, traditionally known for Bitcoin mining, has been pivoting toward AI infrastructure as demand for computing power used to train large language models has surged. Other publicly traded miners are following a similar trajectory, using existing power agreements and site capacity to court hyperscale AI tenants rather than expand pure $BTC hashrate operations.