Nineteen billion dollars, one AI lab, and a former Bitcoin miner playing landlord. The word in the press release is 'deal' — let's see what that actually means. This is The Data Center Daily. Today — a monster lease that needs a stress test, Duke Energy drafting its own rulebook, and the biggest data campus on Earth officially dead in Virginia. Confident capital, unwritten grid rules. Let's start with TeraWulf and Anthropic. Channel NewsAsia writes:
July 6: TeraWulf said on Monday it signed a 20-year lease with Anthropic for data center infrastructure, a deal expected to generate about $19 billion in contracted revenue, sending the bitcoin miner's shares up more than 10 per cent in early trading.
TeraWulf signed a 20-year lease with Anthropic: roughly $19 billion in contracted revenue, and shares jumped more than ten percent. And note the word — signed, not announced. Twenty years, at a purpose-built campus at its Hawesville site. Hawesville. That's a bitcoin mine. TeraWulf built that around cheap power for proof-of-work — and now they're the landlord for an AI lab? I want the megawatt commitment, not the revenue headline. Right, and $19 billion over twenty years is a billion a year, give or take. It's real, it's contracted — but it's a lease. TeraWulf is the landlord, Anthropic is the tenant, and the power procurement still lands on somebody's desk. And here's the tell — an AI lab writing the check, not a hyperscaler. Pension money went greenfield into EdgeConneX. This is Anthropic renting a converted miner's shell. That's a different demand signal, and I want to see how much of that $19 billion is committed capacity versus an option. Elizabeth Ouzts, writing in Canary Media:
For months, clean energy and consumer advocates in North Carolina have pressed Duke Energy to follow the national trend and create special rules and prices for data centers. The state’s predominant utility insisted such rules were unnecessary, rejecting claims that the power-hungry facilities could overwhelm the grid or burden households with unfair costs.
Duke Energy in North Carolina is pitching what it calls a large-load tariff for data centers. The U-turn is the point — for months, Duke insisted it didn't need a dedicated rate structure, the grid wouldn't get overwhelmed, and households wouldn't eat the cost. And now it lands right before a rate-hike hearing. That timing tells you this is a concession to critics, not a road-to-Damascus moment on cost allocation. Right, so the tariff shows up the exact week they're asking regulators to raise rates. Calling that 'getting ahead of it' is generous. It feels more like a hostage negotiation with a filing deadline. And here's the number I want and still don't have: does this tariff make data centers pay their own interconnection freight, or does it just formalize shifting that onto the 2.8-million-customer base? Georgia Power's PSC still hasn't put a dollar-per-customer figure on a 10,000-megawatt AI bet. At least Duke's putting something on paper. That's the piece that actually matters. Duke sits outside RTO jurisdiction — no FERC tariff order reaches it, no PJM backstop. Whatever Duke writes, Duke writes. So the words on that page are the whole ballgame. And it's happening at the same time — the emergency-order habit and the write-your-own-rules move, side by side. One utility is drafting cost-allocation rules while the next diesel order is being teed up somewhere else. EIR News, with Paul Gallagher:
Appearing to give in to multiple communities’ widespread opposition, Blackstone’s commercial real estate arm, QTS Realty Trust, has pulled out of a 2,100-acre data center campus known as Prince William Digital Gateway, which was projected to include up to 37 data center buildings and headed to becoming the world’s largest such campus.
It's confirmed. Blackstone's QTS pulled out of the Prince William Digital Gateway — 2,100 acres, 37 buildings, the thing that was supposed to be the largest data campus on the planet. Dead. And EIR is being generous calling it 'life support.' Compass already walked from their 800 acres back in May. When your co-developer's gone and your anchor tenant's gone, all you've got left is a zoning approval and a lot of grass. A hundred-billion-dollar potential megaproject, approved by the county board in 2022, and now there's nobody left to build it. So who ate it? The planning costs, the legal fees, the engineering studies on a site that size don't just evaporate. And notice the footwork — a couple of days before the exit, ZeroHedge reported Blackstone was selling three other Northern Virginia projects to Digital Realty. Manassas, Sterling. They're not fleeing Data Center Alley. They're just done fighting for this one parcel. Right — put that next to the TeraWulf-Anthropic number we just hit. Nineteen billion signed on a converted miner's site, and then the would-be most valuable data campus in the world collapses because the neighbors said no. The capital's confident; the ground rules are still being written. If you follow data centers, you’re probably tracking AI demand too. Check out AI Daily Briefing: top AI news for engineers, founders, and investors, every weekday — real capabilities versus demo hype, explained fast. Find it wherever you listen to podcasts.
What we’re watching next: TeraWulf says initial capacity at the Hawesville campus is expected to come online in the second half of 2027, with full capacity by early 2028.
As always, we’ve put links to every story from today’s briefing in the show notes, so you can dig into the ones you want to read more closely. That’s The Data Center Daily for today. This is a Lantern Podcast.