Google Puts Its Balance Sheet Behind Anthropic's $19 Billion Kentucky Lease, With an Option to Take Over the Data Center

Data center operator TeraWulf announced on November 4 that Google has agreed to provide credit support for the leases that Anthropic signed on the Justified data center campus in Hawesville, Kentucky, a deal that turns Google's credit rating into the financing backbone of one of Anthropic's largest compute commitments. Anthropic's lease runs 20 years and is worth roughly $19 billion in total, covering an IT capacity of about 401 megawatts.

The structure, detailed in SEC filings, covers three separate data center buildings. If Anthropic fails to pay rent or enters bankruptcy proceedings, Google can step in and assume the lease by covering unpaid rent, or, under specified conditions, pay a termination fee and receive equity in Raylan Data, TeraWulf's project company for the campus. The support is not permanent: if Anthropic or its guarantor affiliates obtain and hold an investment-grade credit rating for at least three months, Google's obligations can terminate under the agreed conditions.

For TeraWulf, the value is cheaper money. The company said Google's credit backing should let it secure more competitive long-term loans for a project that would otherwise price at the cost of capital of a mid-cap operator converting from bitcoin mining. Google, rated AA+ by S&P Global and Aa2 by Moody's, sits near the top of the corporate credit scale. TeraWulf chief financial officer Patrick Fleury tied the arrangement directly to project economics, saying the investment-grade support strengthens the financing profile and improves access to lower-cost debt.

The campus timeline is aggressive. The first facilities are expected to enter service in the second half of 2027, with the remaining capacity delivered in phases through the second quarter of 2028. TeraWulf simultaneously expanded its agreement with engineering firm Fluor Enterprises, which will handle engineering, procurement and construction for the three buildings, a choice the company said addresses the labor squeeze that has slowed hyperscale construction across the industry.

The deal extends a playbook Google has used before. At TeraWulf's Lake Mariner campus in New York, Google provided backing of up to $3.3 billion in 2025 for leases held by the AI cloud provider Fluidstack and received warrants equal to roughly 14 percent of TeraWulf's equity. Google also supported TeraWulf's Abernathy, Texas joint venture before TeraWulf sold its stake to a Fluidstack-led investor group. A July analysis by Rittenhouse Research noted that the original Justified terms allowed Nvidia, Amazon or Google to backstop Anthropic's rent if Anthropic did not secure its own investment-grade rating before financial close. Google took that role.

What is different this time is the tenant. Fluidstack is a reseller of compute; Anthropic is the counterparty itself, signing a direct 20-year obligation worth about $19 billion. Anthropic's amended S-1 filing disclosed $895.4 billion in purchased commitments and lease agreements, substantially all related to compute and infrastructure, and arrangements like this one are how those commitments get converted into actual buildings. The hyperscaler effectively becomes a credit rating intermediary, renting its balance sheet to the AI lab and the data center developer at once.

The arrangement also spreads the default chain across three parties with different exposure: Anthropic gets capacity without a down payment it cannot afford, TeraWulf gets financing it could not price alone, and Google gets optionality, equity kickers, and a secured path to the capacity itself if the AI lab stumbles. As data center financing grows more creative, the line between customer, landlord and insurer keeps getting thinner, and Google is now standing on all three sides of it.