Why's Terawulf stock surging today?

TeraWulf (NASDAQ: WULF) shares jumped 17% on Monday after the former Bitcoin miner announced it had signed a 20-year lease with Anthropic. 

The company expects to bring in roughly $19 billion from the deal. This deal hands one of the most closely watched AI-infrastructure players a marquee tenant and two decades of contracted revenue.

WULF traded around $24.14 by late Monday morning, up from Friday’s close of $21.18, with an intraday range of $23.38 to $25.15, according to Google Finance. The move continues an upward trend that has seen WULF grow more than 117% since the start of the year.

The deal means Anthropic will occupy a purpose-built AI campus at TerraWulf’s Justified Data site in Hawesville, Kentucky, near Louisville. The build-out is in different stages: with the first services slated for H2 of 2027, while the full 401 megawatts of critical IT capacity will go live in early 2028. That’s enough power to run large-scale AI training workloads.

Anthropic is the brain behind the Claude family of AI models. For TeraWulf to lock in a customer of that magnitude for two decades, it means the company’s pivot is not just speculative but has the potential to build a strong revenue base. 

Effectively, the lease is betting on Anthropic being a key player in the field of AI two decades from now, as Contellation Research noted.

Two deals on the same day

TeraWulf paired the lease with an exit. The company agreed to sell its 50.1% stake in an AI data center joint venture in Abernathy, Texas, to an investor group led by Fluidstack, its partner in the project. 

While TeraWulf did not disclose terms, the company claimed it had earned a premium on the ~$450 million it sunk into the venture. The next step is to redeploy that capital into sites fully owned and controlled by TeraWulf.

“Collectively, the transactions enhance TeraWulf’s long-term revenue visibility, strengthen its financial position, and further align the Company’s capital with infrastructure platforms where it maintains direct ownership, customer relationships, and operational control,” the company said in its announcement.

From Bitcoin mining to AI data centers

The company started as a Bitcoin mining business, with facilities in New York and Pennsylvania. In Q1 of 2026, TeraWulf generated $21 million in revenue from its high-performance computing hosting and passed the ~$13 million mark from its mining operations, for the first time ever.

That transition to AI data centers has not come cheap. In Q1, TeraWulf posted $427.63 million in losses. Q1 ended with TeraWulf having about $3.1 billion in cash and roughly the same amount in long-term debt.

TeraWulf is not the only company making a pivot. Plenty of mining companies are leasing power and ready-built space to AI firms, as this provides a stable income stream compared to the volatility of Bitcoin mining. 

Demand for data centers is sky high: the International Energy Agency projects data center electricity use will nearly double to about 945 terawatt-hours by 2030, with AI the main driver.

Constellation Research believes there is a greater subtext to the deal, with Neoclouds and smaller providers moving quickly ahead of Meta’s cloud-computing launch, and TeraWulf sits among the companies most exposed to that shift. 

Kentucky has become a key part of TerraWulf’s plans. The company already has hundreds of megawatts of grid-connected capacity in the Hawesville area and has a separate 285-acre site in Kentucky that can support more than a gigawatt.

What to watch next is delivery. The first phase of the Anthropic campus is more than a year out, and the $19 billion figure depends on capacity coming online through 2028 and a tenant that stays the course.

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