In February, TeraWulf paid $200 million for a shut aluminum smelter at Hawesville, Kentucky. A smelter is a very large electrical connection with a building attached, and the connection was what TeraWulf wanted.

That site now carries a twenty-year lease with Anthropic for 401 megawatts of computing load. Coin Bureau puts the contracted revenue over the initial term at roughly $19 billion.

Matthew Sigel, who runs digital asset research at VanEck, put the reason plainly when Anthropic signed a $9 billion deal with Riot. A miner turns electricity into bitcoin. An AI company turns the same electricity into output worth about ten times more per unit of power.

The power is what everyone is short of. Analysts quoted by Coin Bureau expect shortages to hold back 40% of AI data centers by 2027, with four to seven year waits to get connected to the grid. Satya Nadella has said Microsoft's problem is a shortage of what he calls warm shells, meaning buildings already wired and cooled and ready to take server racks.

Bitcoin miners spent a decade buying exactly that, cheaply, in towns nobody else wanted.

Getting new land is the hard part now. In Maysville, on the other side of the state, Delsia Bare and her mother Ida Huddleston turned down $26.48 million for farmland a company wanted for a 2.2-gigawatt data center. TeraWulf never had that conversation, because it already owned the ground and the wires.

For anyone holding bitcoin, this pulls in two directions. Miner income gets steadier and less tied to the coin price. Every megawatt rented to an AI tenant is a megawatt not making bitcoin, and Sigel expects that to make miners bigger sellers for a while before the economics settle it back down.

The share of revenue that arrives as rent is the number to look for in the next round of miner results.

Bitcoin has sat in the low $60,000s for weeks. In that time Michael Saylor's company sold coins for a fourth time, the Clarity Act got pushed back again, and an AI selloff ran through stocks. None of it moved the price.

Matt Hougan, who runs investments at Bitwise, thinks that is the best news in crypto. His argument is that bear markets end in boredom, and you know one is finished when bad news stops doing damage.

One fact sits awkwardly beside it. Americans have been paying less for bitcoin on Coinbase than the offshore price for ninety days straight, the longest run on record, and that got no reaction either. If you are waiting for the market to tell you something before you buy or sell, it is not going to say anything before Friday.

The Clarity Act has a date. The Senate has set a procedural vote for September 15, the step that decides whether the bill gets floor time at all. Bettors on Polymarket give it a 20% chance of being signed into law this year.

John Gillen, who hosts the Milk Road Show, thinks the low number is the point. The bill has been called dead nine or ten times in Washington, he says, and it is still standing. A Senate that actually moves it would surprise almost everybody.

That is one man's argument. The date is the solid part. The House passed its version in July of last year and the Senate needs sixty votes. If you own anything whose rules depend on Congress rather than on an agency, September 15 is when you find out.