Much of the bitcoin mining industry has expanded into AI infrastructure over the past couple of years, and now one miner’s AI pivot is paying off massively via an Anthropic deal involving datacenter capacity coming online by 2028 and potentially generating $19 billion in revenue. The move was announced by datacenter infrastructure provider TeraWulf on Monday and involves a 20-year lease by Anthropic for a new infrastructure campus in Hawesville, Kentucky.
Specifically, the agreement covers about 401 megawatts of critical IT load at TeraWulf’s Justified Data campus, a purpose-built AI facility expected to begin operating during the second half of 2027 and reach full capacity in early 2028. The projected $19 billion represents contracted revenue over the initial 20-year term, rather than money TeraWulf will receive upfront.
The company also agreed to sell its 50.1% stake in the 168-megawatt Abernathy data center joint venture in Texas to an investor group led by Fluidstack. TeraWulf said it is selling the stake at a premium to its roughly $450 million investment, although it did not disclose the transaction’s purchase price. Following the Anthropic agreement, TeraWulf says its portfolio includes 839 megawatts of leased critical IT capacity.
Investors appeared pleased with the transformation. TeraWulf shares jumped more than 10% in early trading Monday, after already gaining about 85% since the start of 2026.
Crypto and AI Worlds Collide
The deal is the latest example of bitcoin miners using their power contracts, land, transmission connections, cooling systems, and data center expertise to pursue AI customers. While converting a bitcoin mining site into an AI data center is not a plug-and-play process, miners often control the hardest and slowest parts of a new project: large supplies of electricity and sites already connected to the grid.
Bitcoin mining revenue is highly exposed to the price of bitcoin, network competition, electricity costs, and the protocol’s periodic block-reward halvings. Those pressures have intensified as bitcoin has fallen from its roughly $125,000 peak in October 2025 to around half that level, squeezing margins for less efficient operators. CoinShares estimated in March that publicly traded miners could receive as much as 70% of their revenue from AI and high-performance computing by the end of 2026, up from roughly 30%, while warning that some existing mining facilities would be shut down or repurposed.
To be clear, TeraWulf has not entirely exited its mining business, but its change in focus is clear. The company said in its 2025 annual filing that high-performance computing had become its primary growth engine, while legacy mining infrastructure would be operated opportunistically.
Some companies are treating AI as a second business, while others have made it their main growth strategy, and some have gone as far as abandoning bitcoin mining completely. As another example, Bitdeer continued producing bitcoin in 2026 but sold its entire bitcoin treasury, directing liquidity toward AI infrastructure and data center expansion. While the miner told bitcoin holders not to worry, its July 4 update showed it’s retaining a bitcoin balance of zero and still selling newly-mined bitcoin.
Bitdeer #BTC Weekly Update
🔹 BTC Holdings: 0 (pure holdings, excluding customer deposits)
🔹 BTC Output: 223.1 BTC
🔹 BTC Sold: 223.1 BTC
🔹 Net BTC Added: 0 BTC
📅 Data as of July 3, 2026.#Bitcoin #BTC #BitcoinHoldings #BitcoinCommunity #BTCMining $BTDR pic.twitter.com/pP1GwCcMKC— Bitdeer (@Bitdeer) July 4, 2026
The physical infrastructure layer is not the only place where AI and crypto are colliding. Security researchers are increasingly concerned that advanced coding agents could locate and exploit weaknesses in decentralized finance (DeFi) contracts faster than human auditors can fix them. In late May, blockchain security pioneer and OpenZeppelin co-founder Manuel Aráoz argued that “defenders need to fix every bug while attackers need just one exploit to steal funds,” although other industry figures have noted that the same tools can be placed in the hands of auditors and white-hat researchers.
Notably, researcher Taylor Hornby recently used Anthropic’s Claude during an audit to uncover a soundness flaw in Zcash’s Orchard zero-knowledge circuit that could theoretically have allowed undetectable creation of counterfeit ZEC. Developers temporarily disabled the affected pool via a soft fork before activating a fix via a hard fork. The Zcash Foundation said it found “no evidence of unauthorized value creation,” but the privacy system that concealed transactions also made it difficult to prove that the bug had never been exploited.
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