A data center burned in June. In August the hydrants were still dry

A fire broke out in an unfinished building at the Lake Mariner data center in Somerset, New York, in early June. Firefighters found no working alarm, no suppression system and three dead hydrants, and the safety sheets they are legally entitled to see had reportedly burned in the blaze. Chief Steve Matisz said his crew went in kind of blind, facing black smoke from chemicals they could not identify.

In mid-August, more than two months later, Matisz said the hydrants were still dry and he had seen no work done on them.

“You have to be honest that it's 600 people building the project for six, 12, 18 months, depending on how big it is. And then after that it's three guys and a bottle of Windex.”

— Pilar Thomas, former deputy director of the Office of Indian Energy, Ars Technica, 8 September 2026

Quote source: Pilar Thomas, quoted by Ars Technica, 8 September 2026

Four companies hold a piece of it

The $3.2 billion campus sits on a former coal mine on Lake Ontario, and four companies hold a piece of it:

• TeraWulf owns the campus and operates it, on land leased from a company owned by TeraWulf's own chief executive.
• Fluidstack, a British AI company, will run the facility.
• Google holds warrants for a future 14% stake and guarantees Fluidstack's lease payments.
• Anthropic is among the customers whose compute demand the site exists to serve.

TeraWulf told Ars Technica it is responsible for operational safety and emergency preparedness at the site, and chief strategy officer Kerri Langlais said the company added Knox boxes, more hydrants and safety-sheet go-bags after an after-action review with the county. Somerset asked for a meeting anyway. The town supervisor is among those who have not received one.

The jobs number moved between 2019 and 2024

Somerset Operating Company, the landlord entity owned by TeraWulf chief executive Paul Prager, applied for the site's power discount in 2019 promising 165 permanent jobs and $85 million of capital investment. By the 2024 planning board presentation, the full buildout meant 35 to 40 people at a facility drawing up to 500 megawatts.

Governor Kathy Hochul placed a moratorium on hyperscaler data centers last month, and told reporters in July that these projects do not deliver significant long-term jobs despite their scale and their utility demands.

What Anthropic covers and what it can check

Anthropic published a commitment in February to cover the electricity price increases its data centers cause consumers, including all grid infrastructure costs. Lake Mariner falls under it. The pledge covers pricing and says nothing about noise or clean energy.

A source familiar with Anthropic's thinking told Ars Technica they had no details on what the company would need from Fluidstack or TeraWulf to verify clean energy commitments at the site, or whether Anthropic had ever asked.

Compare that with Kentucky. On 6 July, TeraWulf announced a twenty-year, $19 billion lease with Anthropic for a facility there, and Prager told Bloomberg it was one of the first things Anthropic had gone direct on: no Fluidstack, no Google backstop. Anthropic sets the terms at the site it contracted directly. At the leased one it has no visible mechanism to check the claims TeraWulf makes about the same building.

The zero-carbon claim got quieter

TeraWulf's 2024 responsibility report described Lake Mariner as powered by 95% zero-carbon energy. The sustainability policy its board adopted in April 2026 never uses zero-carbon on its own, pairing it with low-carbon each time, and a 2025 finance disclosure says low-carbon energy and puts the figure at 91%.

Langlais said the claim rests on the regional grid mix rather than a contract for specific power. Lake Mariner draws from NYISO Zone A, part of an upstate region that was 87% zero-emission in 2025, mostly nuclear and hydroelectric. Roughly 90 megawatts, about 18% of the site's interconnection capacity, comes through a state programme that Langlais described as an economic development rate rather than a renewable energy product.

None of this stopped construction, and nobody was hurt in the fire. Companies are building at a scale where a cluster of 160,000 chips reads as ordinary, while the paperwork still describes a single owner with a single phone number. We wrote yesterday about a place where nobody counted the workers an AI shift displaced. In Somerset the fire chief cannot find out who owes him three working hydrants.

This piece is informational, not a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any asset.