Google backstops Anthropic's $19 billion data center lease in Kentucky

Google has agreed to stand behind the rent that Anthropic owes on a 401-megawatt AI data center campus in Hawesville, Kentucky, under a set of credit support agreements signed on November 4, 2026 with TeraWulf, the developer and landlord of the site. The lease, signed in July, runs for 20 years and carries about $19 billion of contracted rent over its initial term.

TeraWulf announced the arrangement in a press release on the morning of November 4 and filed the details the same day in a current report with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, attaching the form of the credit support agreement among its subsidiary Raylan Data, TeraWulf Inc., Justified DataPower, Anthropic and Google LLC. On the same day TeraWulf signed a definitive engineering, procurement and construction contract with Fluor for three data center buildings at the campus, which the company calls the Justified Data Campus.

The practical effect is financial. A backstop from Google, whose parent Alphabet carries AA+ and Aa2 senior unsecured ratings from S&P and Moody's, lets TeraWulf borrow for construction against a tenant obligation that lenders can treat as close to investment grade, even though Anthropic itself does not yet hold such a rating. Anthropic's rent starts as each data hall is delivered, in phases that TeraWulf now expects to begin in late 2027 and end in the second quarter of 2028.

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GOOGLE CREDIT SUPPORT FOR THE ANTHROPIC LEASE AT JUSTIFIED DATA CAMPUS.

The lease itself predates the backstop. On July 6, 2026 TeraWulf announced that it had leased about 401 MW of critical IT load at the Hawesville site to Anthropic for 20 years, with about $19 billion of contracted lease revenue over the initial term, and said at the time that the obligations were expected to be supported by investment-grade credit. The November filing identifies who provides that support and on what terms.

Raylan Data, the TeraWulf subsidiary that owns the campus, entered three credit support agreements, one for each lease. Under them Google agreed to backstop certain obligations of Anthropic under the Justified leases. Raylan and Anthropic also amended the leases on the same day in connection with the backstop, but the amendments themselves were not filed and their content is not public.

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Item	Disclosed terms
Tenant	Anthropic, PBC
Landlord	Raylan Data LLC (TeraWulf subsidiary)
Location	Justified Data Campus, Hawesville, Kentucky
Capacity	About 401 MW of critical IT load
Term	20 years
Contracted rent	About $19 billion over the initial term
Rent start	As each data hall is delivered
Delivery	Phases from late 2027 to Q2 2028
Credit support	Google LLC, three agreements signed Nov 4, 2026
Builder	Fluor Enterprises, guaranteed maximum price contract

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The support does not cover the construction years. According to the 8-K, each credit support agreement becomes effective on the commencement date of the final data hall under the corresponding lease, which means Google's obligation starts only once the buildings are delivered and Anthropic is paying rent on the full space. If Anthropic defaults before that point, the form of agreement leaves Raylan with the right to finish the building, and a default that is still continuing on the effective date becomes a trigger at that moment.

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HOW THE GOOGLE BACKSTOP WORKS IF ANTHROPIC MISSES RENT.

The mechanism follows a default notice. If Anthropic fails to pay rent, or becomes subject to an insolvency event, Raylan notifies Google. The form of agreement gives Google 30 days from that notice to verify the trigger and choose among its options. If Google makes no choice and does not elect to defer, it is deemed to have chosen rejection, subject to the six-year limit described in the next section.

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Google option	What happens
Assume the lease	Google pays rent due and replaces Anthropic as tenant
Pay a termination fee	In certain cases, with an equity option in Raylan
Defer the choice	Google pays unpaid rent during the deferral
No answer in 30 days	Deemed rejection, except in the first six years

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When Google assumes the lease, a novation agreement must be signed within 30 days of its election, and the parties are deemed to have signed it if they do not. When Google pays the termination fee instead, its total liability to the landlord and its controlled affiliates is capped at that fee. The fee is set out in a schedule that was not reproduced in the public filing, and the 8-K says only that it amortizes over a defined term after the agreement takes effect.

The rejection route also carries an equity component. If Google pays the termination fee, it can acquire an interest in Raylan equal to the fee divided by the total cost of developing the land, a figure that includes construction and financing costs. Any rent Google pays to cure a default, plus the cost of a deferral, remains a debt of Anthropic: the tenant must reimburse Google's cure expenses plus an administrative fee of 5% of that cost, with default-rate interest if repayment is more than 30 days late.

The arrangement is designed to fall away once Anthropic can stand on its own credit. The agreement terminates when Anthropic, a successor parent or a subsidiary holds an investment-grade rating from S&P, Fitch or Moody's for at least three months during the lease term, and the qualifying entity has guaranteed all of Anthropic's lease obligations. The exact rating level is left blank in the filed form. No warrants or other fees payable to Google appear in the form of agreement.

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THE TPU CLAUSE IN THE GOOGLE CREDIT SUPPORT AGREEMENT.

The most specific provision in the filed form ties Google's exit options to its own hardware. For six years after the agreement takes effect, Google cannot exercise the rejection option, the one that ends with a capped termination fee, unless an "Equipment Capacity Trigger" has occurred. If the 30-day verification period ends before the sixth anniversary and the trigger has not occurred, Google is deemed to have elected to assume the lease rather than reject it.

The form defines that trigger by the share of the building's power that Google's tensor processing units can draw. It occurs when the TPU pods installed in the building are capable of consuming less than 50% of the tenant's critical power, where TPU pods include racks with tensor processing units, associated machine learning and TPU systems, and pod-specific networking racks.

Read together, the two provisions mean that during the first six years Google can walk away for a capped fee only from a building in which less than half of the critical power is available to TPU pods. A building filled mainly with TPU capacity would, on a default in that period, pass to Google as tenant. The filing does not say what hardware Anthropic plans to install at Hawesville, and TeraWulf's press release does not mention TPUs at all, so the clause describes the incentives of the contract without confirming the equipment mix.

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THE $19 BILLION ANTHROPIC LEASE PRICE PER MEGAWATT.

TeraWulf has not disclosed the rent schedule, escalators or the split of the $19 billion between the three leases. A simple average over the full term, treating rent as flat and ignoring the phased start, gives a sense of the scale of the commitment that Google is now backing.

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Metric	Simple average
Rent per year, full campus	About $950 million
Rent per month, full campus	About $79 million
Total rent per MW over 20 years	About $47.4 million
Rent per MW per year	About $2.37 million
Rent per kW per month	About $197

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These figures are arithmetic on TeraWulf's two published numbers, about $19 billion and about 401 MW over 20 years, and they describe contracted rent for powered space. They do not include the servers, accelerators and networking that Anthropic or its partners would install in the buildings, whose cost is not part of the lease.

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FLUOR CONSTRUCTION CONTRACT AND THE KENTUCKY DELIVERY SCHEDULE.

The second agreement signed on November 4 covers construction. TeraWulf entered a definitive engineering, procurement and construction contract with Fluor Enterprises on a guaranteed maximum price basis for three data center buildings at the campus, covering engineering, procurement, construction, testing and commissioning. It builds on a limited notice to proceed that TeraWulf gave Fluor in March 2026.

The contract includes defined delivery milestones, open-book cost reporting, procurement oversight and contractual performance protections, according to TeraWulf. The guaranteed maximum price itself has not been fixed: the company said it is being established as engineering and procurement progress, and no dollar value was disclosed. Chairman and chief executive Paul Prager said that Fluor gives TeraWulf the ability to scale execution without building a global engineering and construction organization internally.

The schedule has moved slightly since July. The original announcement expected initial capacity in service in the second half of 2027 and the full 401 MW by early 2028, while the November filing describes phased deliveries beginning in late 2027 and concluding in the second quarter of 2028. Because Anthropic's rent starts per data hall, and Google's support starts only after the final hall, the gap between the first and the last delivery is also the period in which the project carries Anthropic credit without the Google backstop.

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WHAT THE DEAL CHANGES FOR ANTHROPIC, GOOGLE AND TERAWULF INVESTORS.

For Anthropic, the backstop lowers the cost of capacity it has already contracted. TeraWulf said it structured the Anthropic leases from the outset to address counterparty credit, financing costs and capital requirements, and its chief financial officer, Patrick Fleury, described cost of capital as fundamental to infrastructure development. Cheaper project debt for the landlord is the main channel through which such a guarantee can feed back into the rent a tenant accepts. Anthropic's own disclosures put the size of its compute commitments in context, as covered in our report on Anthropic's $517 billion compute plan and its infrastructure risks and in our analysis of the commitments listed in Anthropic's amended S-1.

For Google, the agreement extends an existing pattern. Google already provided credit support for leases at TeraWulf's Lake Mariner campus in New York, a structure we described in our article on the Lake Mariner AI data center. In Kentucky the counterparty is Anthropic directly, a company in which Google is also an investor and cloud supplier, and the TPU clause links the backstop to the use of Google's own chips in the buildings.

For TeraWulf shareholders, the filing turns a signed lease into a financeable project but leaves the debt package open. No filing gives the size of the project debt, the borrower or the lenders, and TeraWulf describes the debt financing only as anticipated. The company also said its Muskie Data Campus in eastern Kentucky had its contracted power expanded to 1 GW in October and that its Lake Mariner campus is operating.

For Claude users and API customers nothing changes in the near term. The Hawesville capacity is not expected before late 2027, and neither Anthropic nor TeraWulf has said which Claude workloads or regions it will serve.

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GOOGLE ANTHROPIC KENTUCKY BACKSTOP: CONFIRMED FACTS AND OPEN QUESTIONS.

The public record establishes the main structure. Google LLC signed three credit support agreements on November 4, 2026 covering Anthropic's leases for about 401 MW at Hawesville, Kentucky, worth about $19 billion over 20 years. The support starts with the final data hall, lets Google assume the lease, defer, or in certain cases pay a capped termination fee with an equity option, and ends once Anthropic reaches an investment-grade rating for three months with the required guarantee in place. In the first six years, the fee route is closed unless TPU pods can draw less than half of the tenant's critical power.

Several numbers remain undisclosed: the termination fee schedule, the rating threshold, the content of the lease amendments, the size and terms of the project debt, and the guaranteed maximum price in the Fluor contract. Anthropic has not published its own announcement of the agreements, so the description of how the backstop works rests on TeraWulf's press release, its 8-K and the form of agreement attached to it.

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