Anthropic Strikes $9 Billion Compute Deal With Bitcoin Miner Riot Platforms

Bitcoin miner Riot Platforms has struck a 20-year agreement to supply 191 megawatts of capacity to Anthropic. The deal is valued at roughly $9 billion, Bloomberg reported Monday, citing people familiar with the matter. Riot's own press release referred to the customer only as a "leading frontier AI" company without naming it. This is already Anthropic's second multibillion-dollar contract with a Bitcoin miner in the past five weeks, and it shows how badly the AI industry needs electricity.

Terms of the Riot Platforms Deal

The capacity will come from Riot's campus in Rockdale, Texas. The company previously used that site exclusively to mine Bitcoin, and part of the infrastructure is now being converted for AI computing. The agreement runs for 20 years and covers 191 megawatts of capacity for training and running AI models. Riot confirmed the contract in a Monday press release but did not publicly disclose the value or the client's name. Those details emerged later in Bloomberg's report, which cited people familiar with the negotiations. Building out the new capacity is expected to take several years, with payments spread across the full term of the deal. The Rockdale campus has long been counted among the largest Bitcoin mining sites in North America, so converting part of it for AI work looks like a logical move for a company hunting new revenue streams.

Who Is Riot Platforms

Riot ranks as the world's fourth-largest publicly traded Bitcoin miner. The company's market capitalization stands at $7.33 billion. For Anthropic, this is already the second major deal with a Bitcoin miner in under six weeks: on July 6, the company signed a 20-year data center lease with TeraWulf worth $19 billion. Together, the two contracts show how fast AI labs are chasing power and ready-built server sites. Building a data center from scratch takes years, while miners already hold grid connections, construction permits and industrial land today. Anthropic, for its part, keeps raising record funding rounds to train its Claude models and is racing OpenAI for compute, which makes fast access to ready power critical.

Miners Are Rushing Into AI

Riot joins a growing list of Bitcoin miners converting part of their capacity into AI data centers:

• Bitdeer boosted its BTC output nearly fivefold this quarter while expanding into high-performance computing
• CleanSpark is betting on AI contracts after missing Wall Street's earnings targets
• MARA Holdings, Core Scientific, Hut 8 and IREN have already signed their own agreements with AI firms

Bernstein analysts wrote in a July 23 report that partnerships between AI companies and Bitcoin miners have become necessary. The reason is straightforward: power shortages are slowing new data center construction, and miners already have grid connections in place. Texas's ERCOT grid has long drawn miners with flexible rates and room to scale consumption fast. Those same advantages now attract AI companies that need megawatts immediately, not years after permitting. For miners, such deals also smooth out volatile income: Bitcoin's price and network difficulty shift constantly, while AI contracts typically lock in payments for years ahead. US data center power demand has grown faster than new generation capacity in recent years, and analysts expect that gap to persist at least through the end of the decade.

Market Reaction

Riot shares fell 5.4% during Monday's session. Hours after the close, though, the stock jumped more than 21% in after-hours trading. Shares are up over 53% year to date, according to Yahoo Finance data. Bitcoin itself traded near $64,100 at the time, and some traders chose to lock in gains and exchange bitcoin for dollars right as the news broke. Neither Riot nor Anthropic has publicly commented on the deal's details. Investors are increasingly repricing public Bitcoin miners not as pure crypto plays but as holders of scarce power infrastructure that also suits AI computing. If the contract holds up as Bloomberg described it, it would rank among the largest single power agreements ever struck between an AI company and a Bitcoin miner.