Anthropic has secured a 20-year, $9.1 billion agreement with Riot Platforms, a Bitcoin miner transitioning to AI data center services, for 191 megawatts of computing capacity at Riot's Rockdale, Texas campus. The deal reflects Anthropic's aggressive capacity procurement strategy as it races to meet skyrocketing customer demand for Claude AI products. Riot's stock surged 25% in after-hours trading on the news.
Delivery will be phased, with the first 96 megawatts targeted for December 2027 and full deployment by June 2028. The agreement includes two five-year extension options that could raise total contract value to $16.1 billion. Riot secured $573 million in interim financing from Morgan Stanley to fund initial development. Combined with AMD's existing 50 MW lease at Rockdale (50 MW), Riot now has 241 MW of signed contracts worth approximately $9.8 billion in expected revenue from two of the most critical AI ecosystem players.
The deal signals how AI companies are increasingly turning to alternative infrastructure providers—especially former Bitcoin miners with existing power and real estate assets—to bypass bottlenecks at traditional cloud vendors (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud). Anthropic's total infrastructure commitments now exceed $64 billion (including $10B to Volta Infra and ~$45B to xAI). For practitioners tracking AI capex, this confirms that frontier labs are willing to lock in multi-decade contracts and commit real capital to ensure compute access.