TeraWulf's CEO Leases Land to His Own $3.2B Data Center

TeraWulf’s Lake Mariner campus in the Town of Somerset, New York, reads on paper like a straightforward public-company project. It is not. SEC filings show TeraWulf, the Nasdaq-listed operator, leases the 157 acres under the campus from Somerset Operating Company LLC, a subsidiary of Riesling Power LLC, an entity whose sole member is a revocable trust that TeraWulf’s own chairman and chief executive, Paul Prager, runs as sole trustee. The landlord and the tenant answer, in practice, to the same person, even as coverage of the site’s $3.2 billion in financing draws national attention this month after a fire exposed how many separate companies actually stand behind the project.

Why it matters

For developers and construction firms pricing land or courting a joint venture near a hyperscale campus, the paperwork rarely names who is really on the hook. At Lake Mariner, the visible operator is TeraWulf, the visible tenant is the UK compute firm Fluidstack, and the AI demand comes from Anthropic and other customers buying capacity through Fluidstack. But the ground lease sits inside a CEO-controlled holding company, and the financial backstop behind Fluidstack’s lease payments, the number that actually makes the deal bankable, comes from Google. That layering is standard practice in this asset class now, and it means the entity signing a permit application or a utility interconnection filing is often several steps removed from the party actually capitalizing the build.

The numbers

TeraWulf’s October 2024 ground lease with Somerset Operating Company runs 35 years with up to nine 5-year renewals, at $281,398.20 in annual rent adjusted for inflation. Google’s backstop of Fluidstack’s lease obligations at the campus reached roughly $3.2 billion cumulative as of the August 2025 expansion, up from $1.8 billion, in exchange for warrants covering 32.5 million TeraWulf shares that bring Google’s pro forma stake to about 14%. Fluidstack now has roughly 360 megawatts of critical IT load contracted across three buildings, with the newest, a 160 MW addition, targeted to go live in the second half of 2026.

What’s next

Niagara County’s Legislature authorized outside counsel in May 2026 to determine whether Lake Mariner owes sales tax the company has avoided under a decades-old internet-data-center exemption, a live test of how much public benefit these structures actually forgo. TeraWulf has said it is not seeking a separate property tax abatement. More coverage of these deals runs in data centers.