TeraWulf Locks In $19B Anthropic AI Lease, Sells Abernathy Stake for $530M as WULF Surges 12%

TeraWulf wants to be an AI infrastructure landlord. It just landed the lease to prove it. The BBTC$63,774.00▲1.92% miner-turned-data-center host has signed a 20-year deal with Anthropic worth approximately $19 billion in contracted revenue — an announcement that sent shares climbing roughly 12% in Monday morning trading and earned the company a fresh Buy rating from B. Riley, which slapped a $32 price target on the stock. Tack on a separate agreement to sell TeraWulf’s 50.1% majority stake in the Abernathy joint venture for roughly $530 million, and Monday marks the most aggressive single move yet in the company’s hard pivot away from crypto mining toward high-performance data center hosting. (CoinTelegraph)

The lease covers TeraWulf’s Justified Data campus in Hawesville, Kentucky. Fully built out, the site delivers approximately 401 MW of AI data center capacity, with completion targeted for 2028 — pushing TeraWulf’s total leased IT capacity to 839 MW, per B. Riley analysis cited by Blockspace Media. That number matters. At 839 MW, TeraWulf sits among the larger dedicated AI infrastructure operators in the country, and the 20-year term hands the company a revenue backlog that simply dwarfs anything its Bitcoin mining operation ever produced.

The Abernathy sale is the other half of Monday’s story — and the numbers have already attracted scrutiny. TeraWulf agreed to sell its 50.1% stake in the Abernathy joint venture for approximately $530 million, per an SEC 8-K filing surfaced by StockTitan. One secondary source referenced a $450 million figure alongside the Abernathy deal with FluidStack — an $80 million gap with no explanation available from the filings. The SEC-sourced number is $530 million. Whether that discrepancy reflects a reporting lag, a conditional payment structure, or a straight error at the secondary outlet remains unknown; investors pricing WULF on Monday morning appear to have taken the higher figure at face value and moved on.

The market didn’t wait around. WULF shares climbed roughly 12% in Monday morning trading, extending a roughly 107% year-to-date rally that has made the stock one of the standout performers among publicly traded crypto-adjacent names — pre-market, shares had surged as much as 15% before the opening bell, the gap suggesting some profit-taking once the session actually got going. B. Riley issued its Buy rating and $32 target framing the Anthropic lease as a transformative revenue anchor, according to Blockspace Media. Market Chameleon similarly characterized the deal as locking in a $19 billion AI revenue stream.

The Economics of the Pivot

The pivot itself is not new. TeraWulf has spent months repositioning toward AI and HPC workloads, following a path blazed by Core Scientific, Hut 8, and Iris Energy — miners who figured out that their power-hungry facilities could command far higher margins hosting GPU clusters for AI labs than running SHA-256 hashes ever would. The economics are stark: a megawatt leased to an AI tenant under a long-term contract generates predictable, contracted revenue at multiples of what that same megawatt earns mining Bitcoin, especially as network difficulty climbs and hashprice compresses. Spread across 20 years, TeraWulf’s $19 billion figure works out to roughly $950 million annually in contracted revenue — a number that, if realized, would fundamentally re-rate the company.

Risks Remain Real

Skepticism is warranted. A 20-year lease is only as good as the counterparty’s ability to pay, and Anthropic — well-capitalized, Amazon-backed — is still burning cash at extraordinary rates to train frontier models. The buildout timeline leaves years of execution risk between Monday’s announcement and actual revenue recognition; construction delays, power procurement bottlenecks, grid interconnection queues, and the possibility that AI compute demand normalizes before the Hawesville campus comes online are all real risks that a headline number cannot capture. TeraWulf also retains exposure to Bitcoin mining volatility on its remaining capacity, and the broader crypto market is hardly euphoric: BTC trades at $63,576, up 1.6% over 24 hours, while the Fear & Greed Index sits at 24 — Extreme Fear — as of July 6, 2026. Total crypto market cap stands at $2,285.59 billion.

What Makes This Different

What makes Monday’s announcement genuinely notable is the combination of scale and specificity. A $19 billion contracted revenue figure from a named AI tenant — not a vague memorandum of understanding, but a signed lease — is the kind of hard commitment that converts a speculative pivot into a balance-sheet event; the Abernathy sale adds roughly $530 million in cash or near-cash proceeds, giving TeraWulf capital to fund the Justified Data buildout without diluting shareholders or taking on prohibitive debt. The 839 MW total leased capacity figure from B. Riley indicates the Anthropic deal stacks on top of previously announced leases. Not a swap-out.

For investors, the question is now execution. Pure and simple. The stock’s 107% YTD gain already prices in a substantial amount of optimism, and delivering 401 MW of energized, AI-ready capacity in Hawesville by 2028 — on budget, on schedule, and to Anthropic’s specifications — is the next real test. TeraWulf’s next earnings call will be the first opportunity for management to detail the lease economics, construction milestones, and exactly how the Abernathy proceeds get deployed.