TeraWulf Falls 4% Despite Google Backstop for $19 Billion Anthropic Leases; Cipher Digital Plunges 18%, IREN Tumbles 9%

Good news from Google wasn’t enough to keep TeraWulf (NASDAQ:WULF) out of a broad selloff in AI data center stocks. TeraWulf stock is at $12.04 in afternoon trading, down 4%. The decline comes even though the company disclosed on November 4 that Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL | GOOGL Price Prediction) unit Google is guaranteeing Anthropic’s leases at its Kentucky campus.

Former crypto miners that now host AI workloads are falling much harder. Cipher Digital (NASDAQ:CIFR) stock is at $6.64, down 18%. IREN (NASDAQ:IREN) stock is at $22.22, down 9%. Meanwhile, AI cloud provider CoreWeave (NASDAQ:CRWV) is falling too.

The selloff reverses a rebound from November 3, when IREN rose 10% during a group-wide rally that also lifted Cipher Digital and TeraWulf. One possible reading of the gap is that Google’s support is buffering TeraWulf while its peers take the most of the selling.

Google’s Backstop Kicks In Only After TeraWulf Finishes Building

TeraWulf disclosed that Google signed three credit support agreements covering Anthropic’s 20-year leases at the Justified Data Campus in Hawesville, Kentucky. According to TeraWulf, the leases span approximately 401 megawatts across three buildings and carry contracted commitments of about $19 billion over the initial term. However, the guarantee takes effect only once each lease’s last data hall reaches its commencement date, with phased delivery expected from late 2027 through Q2 2028. That leaves construction-period risk with TeraWulf and its lenders.

Chief Financial Officer Patrick Fleury framed the agreements around funding, saying, “Strong investment-grade credit support strengthens the project’s financing profile and our ability to pursue competitive long-term debt.” Those funding needs are large, since TeraWulf has estimated development costs for the site and initial data halls at $4 billion to $4.5 billion.

Funding Fears Hit Cipher Digital and IREN Harder Than TeraWulf

Worries about paying for these build-outs drove a group-wide selloff over the past month. KBW cut its TeraWulf price target to $20 from $29 on November 2, keeping an Outperform rating. TeraWulf stock is down 22% over the past month, while Cipher Digital stock has dropped 58% over the same stretch.

That wide gap fits the possibility that the guarantee is helping TeraWulf hold up better. Cipher Digital’s Barber Lake data halls are phased from Q4 2026 through Q1 2027. IREN has already delivered liquid-cooled capacity to a hyperscaler, so its decline appears to track the sector’s pullback.

Election Results Put Texas Data Center Campuses in Focus

Results from the November 3 midterm elections added another layer of uncertainty for TeraWulf and its peers. The Texas governor-elect has pledged a data center moratorium. Wells Fargo estimates Texas holds 27% of planned U.S. data center gigawatts. Dan Ives said, “The midterm elections will slow the pace of data center buildouts across the U.S.”

Geography matters for each company here. TeraWulf’s big new campus is in Kentucky, while IREN runs Texas campuses at Childress and Sweetwater. Cipher Digital’s entire development pipeline sits in Texas as well. All of that build-out still needs power, cooling, and networking from somebody, which is the angle we covered in a free report on seven AI infrastructure suppliers that aren’t chipmakers.

How TeraWulf’s Landlord Model Differs From IREN and Cipher Digital

TeraWulf acts as a landlord, securing power-advantaged brownfield sites and leasing critical IT capacity to tenants on long-duration, credit-backed contracts. Cipher Digital follows a similar colocation strategy in Texas, but it finances at the project level and still runs a legacy crypto mining site at Odessa. IREN goes further as a vertically integrated AI cloud platform that owns graphics processing units (GPUs) and sells compute directly to hyperscalers and AI labs. That approach sits closer to CoreWeave, which runs the GPU cloud layer and is the kind of tenant the landlords build for.

Each structure puts risk in a different place. A landlord like TeraWulf leans on tenant credit, while IREN takes on hardware and pricing exposure in exchange for the upside of selling compute directly.

TeraWulf’s Earnings Report Tests Its Kentucky Financing Plan

TeraWulf’s Q3 2026 report is scheduled for November 6, and shareholders want to see how the company plans to fund Kentucky before Google’s support takes effect. The bulls have an investment-grade guarantee and a major AI tenant on their side, which could lower TeraWulf’s borrowing costs once construction ends.

Construction delays, tight electrical labor and possible dilution give the bears plenty to cite until TeraWulf’s last data halls commence. Management still needs to show it can line up long-term debt for Hawesville on competitive terms. It may pay to stay cautious until the Kentucky financing question resolves.

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