On a windy Thursday morning in Barker, New York, this spring, I joined 30 tech journalists as we disembarked from a bus onto the shores of Lake Ontario to tour TeraWulf’s 157-acre Lake Mariner Campus. Roughly the size of 119 American football fields, it is the largest U.S. AI data center under construction.
Before the tour even began, we passed several buildings and a vacant coal power plant. In the 15-minute bus ride from the security gate to our touring destination, adjectives such as enormous and vast came immediately to mind. Once off our bus, we were shuttled into one of the campus’s smaller buildings to obtain our safety gear and attend a lecture on what we were about to see. No photos or recordings were allowed during the actual tour. As we listened to several executives from both TeraWulf and Schneider Electric, it became clear that even for them, the scale of this project and the incredible speed at which it is being completed are impressive.
TeraWulf is an AI infrastructure and power provider. A tagline on its website declares, “AI and high-performance computing scale only as fast as power allows. … TeraWulf delivers the power and the infrastructure that make sustained growth possible.” The company creates “mega” data centers by first finding available land with ready power and fiber connectivity, working with local and state governments for permission and to complete strategies, and partnering with a company like Schneider Electric to bring it all together. TeraWulf, and the very few compatriots they have in this space, are building the data centers the world requires for the AI that we not only want, but expect in the coming decades.
The Barker location of Lake Mariner was once the site of a coal power plant. Unlike many of the hyperscalers that will eventually become users of the data center sites that TeraWulf is building, TeraWulf is not deterred by the environmental implications of site cleanups, which opens up location options that others might not see or find attractive.
To continue reading this article, which appeared in the August 2026 issue of I-Connect007 Magazine, click here.