Anthropic has signed a 20-year, $19 billion deal with bitcoin mining firm TeraWulf to supply it with data center infrastructure.
The deal marks the first major shift from bitcoin to AI for TeraWulf, a journey several former bitcoin miners have taken over the past few years. Known as neoclouds, these operators can more easily transition server racks optimized for mining cryptocurrency to AI training and inference tasks, making them highly sought after by AI developers.
The deal, reported by Reuters, with Anthropic will see TeraWulf build an AI infrastructure campus in Hawesville, Kentucky. Once fully operational, it will supply Anthropic with 401 megawatts of compute capacity. The first half is expected to come online in late 2027, with the rest arriving in early 2028.
Big name crypto miners shifting to neoclouds
TeraWulf is following several big names, including CoreWeave, Nscale, IREN, and Crusoe, in shifting from crypto mining to AI. As the cryptocurrency economy has stagnated and mining operations have become less profitable, AI has opened the door for their technical expertise and infrastructure investments to find a second life.
Some of the largest AI developers have announced multi-billion-dollar deals with these neoclouds. They are more nimble than hyperscalers and more willing to develop custom data centers for a single client. Meta has committed more than $50 billion to neoclouds, including $21 billion to CoreWeave. OpenAI has also made agreements totaling more than $22 billion with CoreWeave.
Anthropic announced the biggest single deal with a neocloud in November, agreeing to invest $50 billion into an AI data center buildout with Fluidstack in Texas, New York, and other sites.
A lot of these deals are about more than simply securing capacity. They involve building and operating custom data centers exclusively for the AI developer.
Even AI developers look to cash in on excess capacity
For AI developers who have overinvested in infrastructure buildout, the rising value of neocloud capacity is drawing them into the market. SpaceX has signed deals with rival AI developers Anthropic, Google, and Reflection AI to provide capacity from its Colossus 1 data center, totaling $2.3 billion in monthly revenue for the aerospace and AI company.
Meta, another major AI developer, is also reportedly interested in getting into the neocloud game. It may not be seeing as much interest in its own AI services as expected, and now that it has available capacity, it may be willing to sell to rivals.
Hyperscalers are still capturing a lot of the data center demand, however. Google has reportedly had to limit the capacity it provides to some customers to retain enough for its own pursuits.
At a time of high demand and limited supply, businesses lower down the food chain may face higher costs and limited availability. Cloud computing costs have not become much more expensive for the average SaaS or app company running web servers and databases. But for any operation that requires GPU compute, there has been a tectonic shift in effective cost, driven by both scarcity and longer commitment lengths.
Also read: As Anthropic pours billions into AI infrastructure, a new low-cost Chinese model is increasing competitive pressure on frontier AI developers. Here's how Z.ai's GLM-5.2 is challenging OpenAI and Anthropic.