- Lead. Anthropic has struck a $9.1 billion deal with Riot Platforms for 191 megawatts of data-centre capacity at Riot’s Rockdale, Texas campus, under a 20-year lease extending through June 2048.
- Fact. Two five-year extension options could raise the total contract value to $16.1 billion; Riot will bring 96 megawatts online by December 2027 and complete the full buildout by June 2028.
- Stake. The agreement — Anthropic’s third large infrastructure deal in recent months — reflects how quickly frontier AI labs are locking in long-dated compute commitments as they compete to expand model capacity faster than rivals can.
The deal, reported by Bloomberg on August 11, adds to a series of computing contracts Anthropic has signed with cloud and infrastructure suppliers as it works to reduce dependence on public hyperscalers. Riot Platforms, which began life as a biotech diagnostics company before pivoting to Bitcoin mining, has been repurposing its existing high-voltage campuses — originally built to support energy-intensive cryptocurrency operations — as AI-optimised facilities. Riot’s stock jumped 25% to $24.40 on the announcement, according to Bloomberg.
Riot’s Pivot From Bitcoin to AI
The Rockdale campus in central Texas was built to handle the extreme power loads of Bitcoin mining — a characteristic that makes it immediately suitable for dense AI compute without the multi-year permitting and grid interconnection process that greenfield data centres require. Riot has positioned this conversion as a strategic evolution rather than an abandonment of its mining business, though the scale of the Anthropic contract dwarfs its remaining cryptocurrency operations in terms of revenue potential.
The deal structure mirrors emerging market practice for frontier AI infrastructure: long-dated, capacity-reserved commitments that give the compute buyer stable access and give the infrastructure provider bankable future revenue. Anthropic’s 191-megawatt reservation is sufficient to power roughly 143,000 homes at any given moment — or, more relevantly, to run thousands of high-end AI accelerator chips continuously, the kind of scale needed to train and serve next-generation models.
Anthropic’s Growing Infrastructure Stack
The Riot deal is the third major external infrastructure commitment Anthropic has disclosed since late 2025. The company signed a $10 billion agreement with infrastructure startup Volta Infra Holdings in an earlier tranche, and in May 2026 struck a deal to purchase close to $45 billion in computing from Elon Musk’s xAI. Taken together, the three contracts represent more than $64 billion in long-term computing commitments — a figure that illustrates the capital intensity now associated with competing at the frontier of large language model development.
The AI infrastructure buildout has already reshaped revenue trajectories for companies further up the supply chain. CoreWeave reported that its revenue doubled to $2.6 billion with an AI contract backlog exceeding $104 billion, a figure that underlines how demand for purpose-built GPU clusters now far outstrips available supply. Anthropic’s decision to contract directly with independent operators rather than relying solely on AWS or Google Cloud reflects an effort to diversify its compute base and negotiate costs outside hyperscaler pricing structures. The Rockdale arrangement, with its long duration and phased capacity delivery, gives the company predictability that shorter-term cloud contracts cannot offer.