Anthropic has committed $9.1 billion over 20 years to lease 191 megawatts of computing capacity from Riot Platforms' Rockdale, Texas campus, with two five-year extension options potentially raising the total value to $16.1 billion. Deployment begins in December 2027, with full buildout expected by June 2028, with Riot expecting $7.3–8.2 billion in cumulative net operating income over the base term.
Riot Platforms, a bitcoin miner-turned-AI infrastructure provider, now has contracted 241 megawatts of capacity worth roughly $9.8 billion in long-term revenue in just six months—adding this Anthropic agreement to its existing AMD partnership. The deal reflects a structural pivot: public bitcoin miners are increasingly valued by investors as owners of grid-connected power and data center assets rather than purely as cryptocurrency producers.
Anthropic has been aggressively locking down compute through multiple channels: a $10 billion, six-year deal with infrastructure startup Volta Infra (Norway), a ~$45 billion commitment to Elon Musk's xAI, and now Riot. Morgan Stanley is providing $573 million in interim financing to Riot to cover early development costs, underscoring how financial engineering is now baked into AI infrastructure buildouts.
For architects: This deal highlights how frontier AI labs are securing physical infrastructure as a competitive advantage—scarcity of grid-connected power is now as critical as chip allocation. Riot's transformation from mining to AI landlord, plus the broader bitcoin-miner-to-data-center pivot, signals that power and land are becoming strategic bottlenecks in the AI race, not just chips.