Kentucky Power and TeraWulf have rewritten the supply contract for the Muskie Data Campus at EastPark, Grayson, in eastern Kentucky, and the headline number has doubled. Under amended and restated transmission and energy service agreements signed on 1 October and announced on 5 October, the contracted capacity for the site rises from 500 MW to 1 GW. The first 500 MW is still to start ramping in 2028; the second 500 MW moves forward a year, from 2030 to 2029, subject to approval by the Kentucky Public Service Commission and to Kentucky Power's construction schedule. TeraWulf's filing with the SEC adds that the company keeps studying whether the campus could reach 2 GW over time, which would need further utility planning and agreements.
Who Pays For The Plant
The part of the deal that interests anyone outside Kentucky is how the cost of the new load is handled. Kentucky Power, an American Electric Power company, plans a 760 MW combined-cycle gas plant at Big Sandy, and TeraWulf has agreed to pay the estimated financing costs of building it, so that, in the utility's words, the cost of serving the new demand is carried by the customer driving it. On top of that TeraWulf funds $100 million of winter bill credits for Kentucky Power's residential customers over the first ten years of the contract, about $25 a month for a typical household during the heating season, starting in 2029. The agreement also carries collateral requirements and other protections for the utility's existing customers. All of it depends on the Commission: Kentucky Power intends to file the amended contract and ask for the related approvals later this year.
Cindy Wiseman, president and chief operating officer of Kentucky Power, said the structure makes sure the costs of new demand are paid by the customers causing it. Paul Prager, chairman and chief executive of TeraWulf, said customer interest in Muskie had been tremendous and that power availability was central to those conversations. TeraWulf bought the site in May 2026 for phased AI and high-performance computing development; Kentucky Power is building a 765 kV / 345 kV substation to serve it, and the project has to follow Governor Beshear's executive order on data center development.
The Neighbours Are Less Sure
The same week's local reporting shows the other side of eastern Kentucky's data center moment. The Daily Independent in Ashland notes that the city council in Russell has imposed a six-month moratorium on data center development while Greenup County's planning commission drafts a zoning regulation, and that Rubix, a company of the Submer Group, hopes to buy the former AK Steel Ashland Works from Cleveland-Cliffs for a 2 GW data center with Kentucky Power as the electricity supplier; the load studies for that one have not been done. In August the Public Service Commission approved a separate agreement for the Justified Data Campus in Hawesville, finding that its terms protected existing customers, which is the test the Muskie amendment will face too.
Reading The Dates
For anyone planning equipment around a campus like this, the dates are the information. A combined-cycle plant announced now and a second 500 MW phase in 2029 mean that the utility, not the campus, is on the critical path, and a regulatory filing that has not been made yet sits in front of both. Contracts of this kind, like the dedicated-generation agreement Applied Digital signed in North Dakota the week before, tie the data center's ramp to a power plant's construction schedule, with everything that implies for the backup generation, the site works and the cooling plant that have to be ready on the same day. The utility-side plant is also a reminder that the data center is only the visible half of the load; the other half is 760 MW of gas-fired generation somewhere else in the state.
Sources: Kentucky Power (AEP), TeraWulf (SEC filing), The Daily Independent
