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When firefighters from the Barker Fire Department arrived at TeraWulf’s Lake Mariner data center campus in Somerset, New York in early June, they found themselves in a situation no first responder wants to face. No functioning fire alarm. No suppression system. Three hydrants that didn’t work. And the safety data sheets that would have told them what chemicals were producing the heavy black smoke filling the unfinished building had, according to TeraWulf, burned up in the fire itself.
Fire Chief Steve Matisz said his crew went into the building “kind of blind.” He added he wasn’t sure what to think about the claim that the safety sheets had been destroyed in the blaze. “It’s been a difficult situation,” Matisz said.
A campus in transition, and apparently in disarray
The Lake Mariner campus sits on the site of a retired coal plant in upstate New York, a location TeraWulf began operating in 2022 primarily for Bitcoin mining. The company has been aggressively pivoting the facility toward artificial intelligence and high-performance computing workloads. TeraWulf has been targeting a combined capacity of 500 to 750 MW across several buildings by the end of 2026. Tenants at the campus include Core42 and Fluidstack, both linked to tech operations supported by Google credit.
The fire broke out in a building that was still under construction. Post-incident discussions reportedly included plans for additional hydrants and better storage protocols for safety data sheets.
The regulatory silence
Perhaps the most unsettling detail isn’t the fire itself but what happened afterward, which appears to be very little. No regulatory follow-ups or investigative actions have been publicly reported in relation to the incident.
From Bitcoin to AI, same infrastructure risks
TeraWulf’s pivot from Bitcoin mining to AI and HPC leasing is a strategic bet that many former crypto miners are making. The company’s stock trades on Nasdaq under the ticker WULF. Landing tenants like Core42 and Fluidstack validates the commercial logic of repurposing crypto mining infrastructure for broader compute workloads.
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