TeraWulf Inc. (WULF) stock traded higher on Monday after CEO Paul Prager pushed back on fears that unfinished AI data centers could become stranded assets, meaning facilities that fail to deliver the returns expected when they were planned. The response came over the weekend.

The whole thing started Saturday when Yuchen Jin, a member of technical staff at Databricks, wrote on X that a friend at an AI lab had secured GPU capacity early. Jin said rental prices for H100, B200 and B300 chips have since risen two to three times, so the lab could resell the compute. Jin added, "OK, so that's the business model."

Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, replied on Sunday that "I think we're going to see a lot of stranded compute in partially complete data centers."

Prager's Build Approach

Prager replied that Musk "may be right that we'll see unfinished data centers." He said not all developers operate the same way. He described TeraWulf's process as identifying sites with customer interest, securing power from investment-grade utilities, fixing specifications, costs and schedules through GMP EPC contracts, obtaining long-term customer commitments backed by investment-grade credit and arranging financing before major construction.

A GMP EPC contract, or Guaranteed Maximum Price Engineering, Procurement, and Construction contract, is an agreement under which a single contractor is responsible for designing and constructing a project within a predetermined maximum price.

Prager wrote, "We may move dirt early, but we don't build on spec." He said he expects some projects to stall because of inadequate capital, weak counterparties, execution misses or regulatory hurdles. He added, "What others call stranded assets, we may call a development pipeline."

Anthropic Lease Question

An X user, Mastacash, questioned whether Anthropic, TeraWulf's flagship tenant, would meet its lease obligations. Prager dismissed the concern, replying, "Nope. They invest billions in the datacenter. Not walking away. No chance." Even under an "extreme bear case," Prager argued, Anthropic "has them well in the money."

WULF Stock Price Activity: TeraWulf shares were up 9.05% at $12.35 at the time of publication on Monday, according to market data.