Project dossier · Hawesville (Hancock County), Kentucky

Justified Data Campus In review

TeraWulf is redeveloping Century Aluminum's idled Hawesville smelter into a data campus leased to Anthropic for 20 years, reusing the smelter's existing 482 MW grid connection for 401 MW of critical IT load.

Key facts

Operator
TeraWulf
Owner
Raylan Data Holdings LLC
Tenant
Anthropic
Filing LLC
Raylan Data Holdings LLC
Size
401 MW
Acres
750
Location
Hawesville (Hancock County), Kentucky
First proposed
2026-07-06
Stage today
In review

Source
read 2026-08-23

What to do next

Next step: An application is in the record. Ask the planning office for the next hearing date and request formal notice.

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What has happened so far (4 events)

  • 2026-02-01financing
    TeraWulf closed on the 750-acre former Century Aluminum smelter site for $200 million; the smelter had been idled since 2022 and Century retained a 6.8% non-dilutive stake in the redevelopment entity, Raylan Data Holdings LLC (February 2026). · source
  • 2026-07-06announcement
    TeraWulf signed a 20-year lease with Anthropic for the Justified campus, expected to generate roughly $19 billion of contracted revenue over the initial term; TeraWulf shares rose sharply on the news. · source
  • 2026-08-18utility
    TeraWulf filed an energy plan with the Kentucky Public Service Commission and the Energy and Environment Cabinet, saying the project meets the governor's new limits on environmental and energy impact and will not shift costs onto other electricity customers. · source
  • 2026-08-21public-comment
    The developer said it is committing to the state's data center requirements, submitted a support letter from Hancock County Judge-Executive Johnny Roberts, and scheduled another public meeting at Hancock County Elementary School; it projects about 1,000 construction jobs and 100 permanent positions. · source

Find the paper trail

Find the paper trail (0 filed · 12 places to look)

State environmental permits

Backup generators, water withdrawal and stormwater are permitted by the state, usually earlier and in more detail than anything filed locally.

County & town filings

The rezoning application, site plan, traffic and noise studies, staff report and every revision.

Utility & grid records

The electricity request is filed with the grid operator and the utility long before the town hears about it — and states the real load.

Federal databases

Works anywhere, and covers the operator's record at its other sites.

  • EPA ECHO facility searchEvery federally-reported air, water and waste permit at a facility, plus its inspection and violation history. Search by address or draw a radius around the site. This project's locality centres on 37.900, -86.750 — search that point with a 5-mile radius.
  • EPA EnvirofactsThe same underlying records, queryable by county — useful for 'what else is permitted near this site' rather than one facility.
  • EPA Facility Registry ServiceResolves the shell LLC on a permit to the facility it belongs to. Worth a look when the filing name means nothing locally.

These are places to look, not evidence that anything has been filed. Links were checked on 2026-08-21; search links are queries, not records. What to ask for.

Around here

Other tracked projects in Kentucky

Cite this page: GridWatch AI, “Justified Data Campus”, aigridwatch.com/projects/terawulf-justified-hawesville-ky, retrieved 2026-10-11.

As of August 2026 (2m ago) · changes weekly — re-check before citing

A working set of identified proposals a community can track, not a census — most of the country's activity is not in here yet. Pennsylvania is the exception: its rows are synced from PA DEP's own data-center permit tracker, so the state's coverage is close to complete and carries the permit trail with it. **Each row carries its own provenance.** Rows showing a verification date link to reporting or the governing body's own record and were read on that date; rows marked *unverified* have no source on record — a lead to check, not a fact to cite. **Stage is derived, not asserted.** *Hearing scheduled*, *Awaiting decision*, *Approved* and *Withdrawn* are computed from each row's milestone dates on every rebuild, so a hearing date that has passed stops reading 'scheduled'. Hearings get moved and projects re-file under new names — treat a scheduled date as the earliest to act by, and confirm with the clerk before relying on it. Leads are mined into data/project_candidates.json and promoted here only after a human reads a primary source.

Part of the data center project tracker — open data, CC BY 4.0 (JSON · CSV).

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