The binding constraint on data center construction isn’t land, and it hasn’t been capital for a while. It’s the interconnection queue. On Aug. 21 the Kentucky Public Service Commission approved a workaround that other developers are going to copy.
The Commission signed off on a 15-year, 482-MW retail electric service agreement for TeraWulf Inc.’s Justified Data Campus in Hawesville, Kentucky, served by Big Rivers Electric Corp. and Kenergy Corp. under Case No. 2026-00115. The order found the agreement “contains adequate protections for existing customers, appropriately allocates financial and operational risks, establishes rates that are fair, just and reasonable.”
Buying a substation instead of waiting for one
TeraWulf, based in Easton, Maryland, bought the former Century Aluminum smelter on Feb. 2 in a transaction valued at about $302 million. The smelter ran from 1969 to 2022. What TeraWulf actually acquired was 250-plus buildable acres, an energized substation, and a direct tie to five 161-kV Big Rivers circuits. The Commission found roughly 482 MW of transmission capability still available at that delivery point.
Aluminum smelting is one of the most power-hungry industrial processes there is, which means every dead smelter in the country is sitting on an interconnection that took years to build and now serves nothing. Steel mills and paper mills carry the same asset.
The work is demolition and abatement, not greenfield pads
Fluor took early engineering, master planning and preconstruction in March and is now general contractor. TeraWulf held a construction kickoff with Fluor on March 10 and ran a local contractor outreach event with more than 20 firms two days later. Construction started before the approval came through and covers demolition, remediation and site prep.
That scope is the part worth reading closely. TeraWulf’s filings put asbestos remediation and spent pot liner removal at about $16.5 million in asset-retirement obligations as of June 30. Spent pot liner is a listed hazardous waste. The company is in Kentucky’s Brownfield Program and holds a general construction stormwater permit plus an Ohio River floodplain construction permit.
Anthropic signed a 20-year lease on July 6 for about 401 MW of critical IT capacity, with delivery starting late 2027 and full contracted capacity in early 2028. CEO Paul Prager framed the site in an Aug. 24 statement: “we’re taking a former industrial site with existing transmission infrastructure and putting it back to productive use at scale.”
What contractors should take from it
If the smelter-to-campus template holds, the growth work in this sector shifts toward abatement, heavy demolition, hazardous waste handling and brownfield site prep, concentrated in old heavy-industry counties rather than in the established data center corridors. That’s a different crew mix and a different insurance profile than pouring pads in a greenfield.
The same logic is running in reverse elsewhere: existing industrial sites with power and workforce already in place are being retooled rather than replaced, as at Nissan’s Sunderland EV36Zero campus, where an operating 1986 plant is becoming a battery and electric-vehicle hub without stopping production.
The campus value of “$4 billion-plus” and the late-2027 delivery schedule are TeraWulf’s own figures, and the company’s spokesperson declined to say whether financial close has occurred. The 401 MW Anthropic lease is disclosed in an 8-K. The regulator’s order is the hard fact here, and it’s now a template sitting in a public docket for any developer who wants to read it.