Anthropic signs $9.1 billion, 20-year compute deal with bitcoin miner Riot Platforms

Anthropic has signed a 20-year compute lease with Riot Platforms worth $9.1 billion, the latest in a string of multibillion-dollar power and data-center agreements the AI lab has struck this year to lock down scarce, grid-connected electricity for its model training and inference needs.

What's new

CNBC reported that "bitcoin miner Riot Platform has struck a $9 billion, 20-year compute deal with Anthropic," a deal confirmed by CNBC's David Faber. Under the agreement, "Riot's Rockdale, Texas computer campus" will lease "191 megawatts" of IT capacity to Anthropic, "giving Anthropic access to scarce, grid-connected power as demand surges for computing power that can be used to provide artificial intelligence — and transitioning Riot from bitcoin miner to AI infrastructure landlord."

The contract is structured to deliver capacity in stages: roughly 96 megawatts online by December 2027, with the full 191-megawatt buildout completed by June 2028. It runs through June 2048, and carries two five-year extension options that, if both are exercised, would push the total contract value to roughly $16.1 billion. Riot shares initially soared more than 20% on the news before giving back most of the gain.

Context

Riot Platforms built its business mining bitcoin, but like several other crypto miners it has spent the past two years converting parts of its power-dense, already-grid-connected campuses into AI data center capacity — an appealing shortcut for AI labs racing to secure electricity in a market where new grid interconnects can take years to permit and build. Riot's Rockdale, Texas site already hosts a separate AI hosting agreement with AMD; the Anthropic lease adds a second major tenant to that same campus.

For Anthropic, this is not an isolated deal. The company has been assembling a portfolio of large, long-term compute agreements throughout 2026 — including a previously announced roughly $10 billion, six-year capacity deal with Volta Infra Holdings for a data center in Norway — as it races to secure the power and chips needed to train and serve increasingly capable Claude models against competitors making similarly aggressive infrastructure commitments.

Why it matters

Electricity, not chips, has become the binding constraint on AI infrastructure buildout for labs at Anthropic's scale, and this deal is a clear illustration of how that's reshaping unrelated industries: a bitcoin miner's core asset — grid-connected power at an existing campus — is now more valuable leased to an AI lab for two decades than used for its original purpose. A 20-year term with extension options out to nearly 30 years is also a signal of how far AI labs are now willing to commit capital and forward-plan around their own longevity and demand growth, a level of commitment that would have been unusual for the industry even a year or two ago. As more crypto miners pursue similar conversions, deals like this one are likely to keep pushing power procurement, not model architecture, to the center of the competitive story among frontier labs.