TeraWulf doubles Kentucky data center power contract to 1GW as utility financing tightens

PWD's tracking shows that before the first data hall rises at the Muskie Data Campus, TeraWulf amended its Kentucky Power agreement to double contracted capacity from 500MW to 1GW and pull the second phase forward by a year, subject to state commission approval.

Amazon and Constellation signed a 20-year power purchase agreement for 690MW at Calvert Cliffs, including 190MW from an uprate the contract is backing, plus a separate retail supply deal for Amazon's PJM operations.

The two agreements sit on opposite sides of the same transaction: a developer or cloud customer secures power, and a utility commits generation or transmission capacity. The first half of that trade is being bid aggressively; the second half is becoming more expensive to supply.

Applied Digital completed its second Ellendale building, adding 75MW for CoreWeave, and Polaris Forge 1 now operates 250MW of a planned 400MW at the North Dakota site, all of it leased to the same customer.

Verda raised a $189 million Series B toward 250MW of data center capacity with no customer named, as Supermicro, MUFG Innovation Partners and Varma joined Emergence Capital's round to take total funding past $450 million. The round names no counterparty, and capital is funding capacity against the promise of a future contract.

Ares secondaries funds lifted their Sabey data center commitment past $500 million, disclosed three months after the initial minority stake, while National Real Estate Advisors and Sabey gave no size or terms for the follow-on. Even secondaries money, usually late to arrive, now wants exposure to data center power contracts.

Forum Markets formed a compute joint venture with Edge Node, taking a 51% stake in Forum Edge AI, which starts with 2MW in Dallas, a 9MW campus in High Point, North Carolina, and a Texas tower site where power and permits are already in place. The scale is small next to hyperscale deals, but the rule is the same: sites with power and permits are the ones that transact.

Data center developers are turning to legacy industrial sites as permitting tightens, and the clearest case this month is Blackstart Digital's agreement to buy IBM's Almaden campus, with its 25MW substation. Blackstart plans to expand the substation and leave more than 500 acres undeveloped; the existing grid connection can be expanded without a new queue slot.

Data center contractors say new state rules in Virginia, Pennsylvania and Texas have extended permitting without cooling demand, and they describe the friction as entitlement risk rather than a thinning order book. The delay is real; the demand behind it is not fading.

U.S. Bank's Tim Keller says rising rates complicate utility capital spending, and utilities are seeking backup bank financing as the Department of Energy pulls back from certain loans. A developer locks a power contract, and the utility must then finance the generation or transmission required to honor it. If DOE loans thin out while rates stay high, the limiting factor becomes the utility's balance sheet rather than the developer's demand.

Keller's warning tracks with the DCD Connect London report drawn from more than 4,000 attendees, which names grid access ahead of capital as the constraint now stopping European projects, along with supply chain and social license. In Europe the immediate blockage is the physical grid; in the United States it is the cost of capital to expand it.

The two markets describe different bottlenecks, but neither is solved by more data center demand. Grid access, supply chain and social license stop projects in Europe; in the United States, the harder problem is financing the grid.

Jera, Dell and Rhaelm signed a memorandum of understanding for a 400MW AI campus at a Chiba gas plant in Japan, with Apollo Global Management backing the first project and operations targeted in or around 2028; the estimated $15 billion across all phases attaches AI capacity to an existing generation site. The capital follows the power asset.

The pattern now runs from Kentucky to Maryland to Chiba: developers and hyperscalers contract for electrons before they lay conduit, and the utility side must finance the uprates, substations and transmission upgrades that turn paper megawatts into delivered power. Keller's warning places that financing as the new choke point.

The change is on the supply side. Data center developers can still raise equity and secondaries capital, as Verda and Ares showed, but the utilities that sign these long-term contracts must borrow, and their borrowing conditions have worsened. If bank financing replaces DOE loans at higher rates, the price of the power behind the data center goes up, or the utility delays the work.

The TeraWulf amendment is therefore more than a Kentucky Power story; it is the shape of the trade now dominating infrastructure capital: developers buy power before they build, utilities sell power before they finance it, and the gap between the two is where the next bottleneck will appear.

The pace of data hall openings now depends on the slower half of the trade, and the slower half is the utility's borrowing calendar.