TeraWulf announced on Tuesday that Google LLC will provide credit support for the debt financing behind the data center Anthropic is moving into. The site is the Justified Data Campus in Hawesville, Kentucky, and the contract covers roughly $19 billion in lease commitments from Anthropic, PBC. Reuters picked up the news; TeraWulf published it.
In the same breath, TeraWulf signed a definitive EPC agreement with Fluor Enterprises — engineering, procurement and construction on a guaranteed-maximum-price basis, for three buildings on the campus.
What credit support actually is
TeraWulf builds and owns the infrastructure, Anthropic rents it for years. For the banks financing construction, the interest rate hangs on how reliably that rent shows up. That is where Google comes in: it provides contractual credit support for the anticipated debt financing. TeraWulf’s statement points at the parent company’s standing on purpose. Alphabet’s senior unsecured debt is rated AA+ by S&P Global Ratings and Aa2 by Moody’s.
“Cost of capital is fundamental to infrastructure development,” says Patrick Fleury, TeraWulf’s CFO. Strong investment-grade credit support, he argues, strengthens the project’s financing profile and its ability to pursue competitive long-term debt.
CEO Paul Prager says the Anthropic leases were structured from the outset to address counterparty credit, financing costs and capital requirements. It reads like hindsight, but it does describe what just happened.
Fluor, and a schedule with dates in it
The Fluor agreement moves the contractor from early engineering to the full scope: engineering, procurement, construction, testing and commissioning. It adds defined delivery milestones, open-book cost reporting, procurement oversight and contractual performance protections. Guaranteed maximum pricing gets set later, as engineering and procurement progress.
The schedule is the part worth noting. Phased ready-for-service completions are expected to begin in late 2027 and run through the second quarter of 2028. TeraWulf names labor availability as a growing constraint on large data center construction, which is its stated reason for buying into Fluor’s subcontractor network instead of building a construction arm of its own.
Anthropic pays the rent, Google pays the rating
I wrote about Anthropic’s bond market problem last week: neoclouds like CoreWeave, Nebius and NScale struggle to place debt because their tenants aren’t investment-grade names either. This deal doesn’t solve that problem, it routes around it. Anthropic supplies the demand, Google supplies the rating, and the bank lends against Alphabet rather than against Anthropic.
Convenient for Anthropic, and not exactly selfless for Google. Google is an investor and a cloud partner, and in October it made Claude models available through Google Cloud. Lending a supplier your creditworthiness is a way of keeping it.
What strikes me most is the contrast with election day. On that same Tuesday, voters in 38 US jurisdictions stopped data centers. The financing for this one campus is now settled, construction is moving, and Hawesville was never on a ballot. The two stories don’t contradict each other. They show you the two places a project like this can die, and this week one of them got cleared.