Anthropic has struck another enormous deal to feed its appetite for computing power, and this time the counterparty is a company that until recently made its money digging up bitcoin.
The twenty-year arrangement is worth $9.1 billion and gives the Claude maker a large slab of capacity at a Texas campus that Riot Platforms is busily converting from crypto mining into rented compute for AI, the latest in a run of vast infrastructure agreements the lab has signed to secure the hardware its models demand.
The contract runs through June 2048 and carries two five-year extension options, so if both are taken up the headline value climbs to $16.1 billion, which makes this less a lease than a multi-decade marriage between a frontier AI lab and a former miner.
What Anthropic gets for the money is 191 megawatts of IT capacity at Riot’s Rockdale campus, delivered in stages rather than all at once. Riot expects to bring 96MW online by December 2027 and the full 191MW by June 2028, a timeline that quietly assumes the ferocious pace of data-centre construction across Texas holds up.
To get there, Riot is leaning on Wall Street. Morgan Stanley is providing $573 million in interim financing to cover the development costs of building the site out, the sort of upfront borrowing that has become routine now that AI’s power demands are outrunning the cash on hand of the firms racing to meet them.
Investors, for their part, liked what they saw. Riot’s shares jumped roughly 25% in after-hours trading on 10 August, touching around $24.30, a reaction that says as much about the market’s enthusiasm for anything tethered to AI as it does about the particulars of the contract.
A guaranteed twenty-year stream of payments from a well-capitalised customer is, after all, a rather steadier proposition than the price of bitcoin.
The company doing the leasing is an unlikely candidate for the role. Riot Platforms is a bitcoin miner by heritage, and a productive one, having mined 1,587 bitcoin in the second quarter of 2026 alone, yet it is now recasting itself as a property manager for compute.
Chief executive Jason Les said the firm had “executed leases totaling 241 megawatts of capacity, representing approximately $9.8 billion of long-term, contracted revenue” with major AI players in the space of six months.
That pivot is not unique to Riot. A clutch of former bitcoin miners have worked out that the sprawling, power-hungry sites they built to hash blocks are almost perfectly suited to training and running AI models, so they have hurried to re-let that capacity to whoever will pay for it.
Anthropic, for its part, has grown used to letting other people build the data centres it then fills with its own workloads.
For the Claude maker the logic is straightforward, if faintly dizzying. Anthropic has been signing compute deals at a pace that would have looked absurd a couple of years ago, striking multi-billion-dollar arrangements with cloud providers, chipmakers and now crypto miners, all in an effort to lock down capacity before its rivals do.
Demand for its models keeps climbing, and the only way to serve it is to keep buying, leasing, and reserving silicon wherever it can be found, even in the repurposed sheds of a crypto business.
There is a neat irony in the whole thing. The energy that once went into conjuring digital coins is being redirected into conjuring digital intelligence, and the same warehouses full of humming machines now answer to a different master.
Whether the economics of these twenty-year bets still look clever in 2048, when the current wave of enthusiasm is a distant memory, is a question none of the people signing the cheques seems in any hurry to answer.
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