TeraWulf Inc. is preparing to raise about $3.5 billion in debt to build a data center campus in Kentucky leased to Anthropic, marking the bitcoin miner's first entry into the leveraged loan market. The financing package would fund construction of a facility designed for artificial intelligence workloads, with Anthropic serving as anchor tenant under a long-term lease agreement.

The deal underscores a broader shift among crypto miners repurposing energy infrastructure for AI computing. TeraWulf, which operates bitcoin mining sites in New York and Pennsylvania, has been signaling this pivot for months. The Kentucky campus represents a bet that steady revenue from hyperscale AI tenants will prove more predictable than cryptocurrency block rewards, which halve every four years and swing with token prices.

Tapping the leveraged loan market — typically reserved for companies with established cash flows — tests investor appetite for miner-to-AI conversion stories. Loan investors will scrutinize Anthropic's creditworthiness, lease duration, and TeraWulf's ability to deliver the campus on schedule. The $3.5 billion figure suggests a facility of significant scale, likely exceeding 100 megawatts of critical IT load.

For equity holders, the debt raise avoids dilution but loads the balance sheet with fixed obligations. Success hinges on execution risk: construction delays, cost overruns, or Anthropic's own funding trajectory could strain debt service. The market will watch whether this structure becomes a template for peers like Core Scientific and Iris Energy.