Hawesville, Kentucky Lost 600 Jobs When Its Aluminum Smelter Died in 2022. It's Getting a $19 Billion AI Campus Back, With Google Standing Behind the Rent.

Pace Ralli stood in front of the Hancock County Fiscal Court on October 26th and delivered what counts, in this corner of western Kentucky, as good news: the old Century Aluminum smelter in Hawesville is about fifteen percent torn down. "That's a big milestone," said Ralli, TeraWulf's vice president of project development, and he meant it. Four years ago this town watched that same smelter go dark for what everyone assumed, at first, would be a matter of months. Hancock County has about 9,000 residents. A plant employing 600 of them is not a line item there; it's close to the whole local economy.

It wasn't a matter of months. Century idled the Hawesville smelter in June 2022, after electricity prices spiked following Russia's invasion of Ukraine and made the plant uneconomical to run. The company issued a WARN notice to more than 600 workers -- 628 by one later count, 504 of them union members -- and said it expected to reopen once power prices came back down. They never did, not enough to matter. The smelter never restarted. In February of this year, Century sold the 750-acre site outright to TeraWulf, a company that started out mining bitcoin and has spent the last two years turning itself into a landlord for AI compute instead.

What TeraWulf is building there is now one of the larger single commitments in the industry: a 20-year lease with Anthropic for roughly 401 megawatts of critical IT capacity at what the company calls its Justified Data Campus, worth about $19 billion over the initial term and up to $33 billion if Anthropic exercises both five-year extensions. Kentucky's Public Service Commission approved a 482-megawatt power agreement for the site in August, running through Big Rivers Electric Corporation and Kenergy -- the same utilities that spent a decade keeping the aluminum plant's enormous appetite for power fed. That's the part of this deal that's easy to miss and shouldn't be: this site didn't have to wait years in an interconnection queue, because a smelter that ran around the clock for decades had already built the connection a data center needs. GridPermit sees projects stall on power more often than on permits. This one skipped that line by moving into a building that already had the wires.

Who actually backs $19 billion

A signed lease is a number on paper until something stands behind it, and on November 4th TeraWulf disclosed what does. Google agreed to backstop certain of Anthropic's obligations under the lease, through three separate credit support agreements. If Anthropic defaults or goes insolvent, Google generally has to step in as the tenant itself, not simply let the lease collapse, for at least the first six years the support is in force. Its other option is to pay a termination fee in exchange for an ownership stake in the project subsidiary that holds the campus -- not in TeraWulf the public company, just the entity built to hold this one deal.

There's a catch worth sitting with. Google's backstop doesn't start until the last data hall under the lease is due to open -- after construction finishes, not during it. Until then, by one outside estimate, TeraWulf is carrying $4 billion to $4.5 billion of development cost on its own, with no guarantee attached. The market noticed: TeraWulf's stock fell about 4% the day the backstop became public, inside a broader selloff that hit the other bitcoin-miners-turned-AI-landlords harder still -- Cipher Mining down 18%, IREN down 9%. Investors weren't pricing the headline lease number. They were pricing the years between signing it and actually finishing the buildings it depends on.

I think that reaction was the correct one, and the backstop deserves to be described precisely rather than rounded up. It isn't Google guaranteeing $19 billion. It's Google agreeing to become the tenant of last resort on a specific set of buildings, years from now, if a specific counterparty fails -- a real, legally binding commitment, but a narrower and later one than the headline number suggests. That's close to the distinction GridPermit's own evidence ladder is built to catch: a $19 billion lease and a $19 billion guarantee are not the same fact, and most of what gets announced in this industry never specifies which one it actually is. This filing does. That alone puts it ahead of most press releases on the same subject.

What 300 jobs means against 628 lost

The jobs case is the part that reaches people who will never read an 8-K. Ralli told the fiscal court the campus will employ at least 300 people permanently, "if not more," up from earlier estimates of 100 to 120, across three planned buildings the company refers to internally as CD1, CD2 and CD3, with construction running close to 1,000 workers at its peak. The first phases are expected online in the second half of 2027, with the full campus running by April 2028. Judge-Executive Johnny "Chic" Roberts told residents the job postings would go up at the Hancock County Career Center once they're ready, the same place people here have always looked for work.

Three hundred permanent jobs is not 628. That's worth saying directly instead of letting a press release round it up. It's still a real number attached to a real site, in a county that spent four years watching its biggest employer sit idle with no reopening date attached to it. Residents at public meetings have kept pressing on the two questions that actually decide whether this campus behaves the way it's being described: water and noise. TeraWulf says the cooling system runs closed-loop, filled once from three on-site wells, about 400,000 gallons per building, and shouldn't need meaningful replacement water for seven to fifteen years, with no draw on the municipal supply at all. Those are the company's own numbers, not yet checked against an independent study. On noise, one neighbor put the concern plainly: it isn't the decibel count that worries her, it's the low-frequency sound and what sustained exposure to it does to people over time. TeraWulf has committed to a site-specific noise study; it hadn't published results as of this writing.

It's also worth knowing this isn't TeraWulf's only Kentucky bet. Three hundred miles east, in Lawrence County, the company's Muskie Data Campus is the customer behind a proposed 760-megawatt gas plant that Kentucky Power says will fund $25-a-month winter bill credits for everyone else on the grid, a deal GridPermit covered here last month, one that leans on ratepayer protection rather than a hyperscaler's balance sheet. Hawesville runs on the opposite structure: no new generation to permit, no bill credit to argue over, just an existing smelter's grid connection and, now, a legal commitment from one of the largest companies in the world to stand behind the rent if the tenant can't pay it. Same company, same state, two genuinely different ways of convincing a community and a utility that a data center is worth building.

What Hawesville actually got this fall isn't the deal a press release describes. It's a demolition crew fifteen percent through tearing down a dead smelter, a credit guarantee that doesn't activate until the building it's protecting is already standing, and a jobs number that replaces roughly half of what the town lost in 2022. All three of those things are true at once, and none of them cancels out the others.

The number to watch from here isn't $19 billion, and it isn't 300 jobs either. It's whether TeraWulf gets through the next two years of construction on its own money, before anyone finds out whether Google's promise was ever going to matter, and whether the noise study the company has promised says what the neighbor worried it would. Hawesville has already lived through one energy-price shock that cost it 600 jobs with no warning anyone could act on. The least this deal owes the county is numbers it can check before the next one.