Anthropic's $19B TeraWulf Deal Fuels the Neocloud Boom

Anthropic has signed a 20-year, $19 billion deal with bitcoin mining firm TeraWulf to supply data center infrastructure, Reuters reported. The agreement marks the first major shift from bitcoin to AI for TeraWulf, joining operators known as neoclouds that transition server racks optimized for cryptocurrency mining to AI training and inference tasks. The deal will see TeraWulf build an AI infrastructure campus in Hawesville, Kentucky, that will supply Anthropic with 401 megawatts of compute capacity once fully operational. The first half is expected to come online in late 2027, with the rest arriving in early 2028. TeraWulf follows 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. Some of the largest AI developers have announced multi-billion-dollar deals with these neoclouds, which 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.