Key Notes
- Anthropic has reportedly agreed to a 20-year, $9.1 billion data center contract with Riot Platforms for 191 MW of computing capacity in Rockdale, Texas.
- Riot officially disclosed the customer only as a leading frontier AI lab, while Bloomberg identified the tenant as Anthropic.
- The agreement could reach $16.1 billion if two optional five-year extensions are exercised and marks another major step in Riot’s shift from bitcoin mining toward AI infrastructure.
Anthropic has reportedly agreed to buy $9.1 billion of data center capacity from Riot Platforms over 20 years, turning one of the best-known US bitcoin miners into a major infrastructure supplier for the Claude developer, as first reported by CoinScreamer.
Riot disclosed the agreement on August 10 as a lease with a “leading frontier AI lab” but did not identify the customer. Bloomberg later reported that the tenant is Anthropic, citing people familiar with the deal.
The contract covers 191 megawatts of critical IT capacity at Riot’s Rockdale campus in Texas. The initial term runs through June 2048 and is expected to generate about $9.1 billion in total contract revenue for Riot. Two optional five-year extensions could increase the total potential value to approximately $16.1 billion.
The agreement adds another large block of AI infrastructure to Anthropic’s rapidly expanding compute portfolio as the company scales Claude, Claude Code, and future frontier models.
Riot Will Deliver 191 MW of Capacity in Texas
Riot plans to deliver the Rockdale capacity in phases. The first 96 MW is scheduled to become available in December 2027, with the remaining 95 MW targeted for June 2028.
The arrangement is structured as a build-to-suit Tier 3 data center project rather than a simple purchase of electricity or servers. Riot will provide the facilities, power, cooling, and related infrastructure needed to host high-density computing equipment for the tenant.
That model places Riot squarely in the expanding cloud computing and AI data center market. The company built its business around bitcoin mining, where access to large amounts of relatively inexpensive electricity is a core competitive advantage. Those same power assets are now becoming valuable to AI developers searching for sites that can support enormous computing clusters.
Riot estimates that the new lease will produce cumulative net operating income of roughly $7.3 billion to $8.2 billion over the initial 20-year term, or an average of approximately $365 million to $411 million per year.
To support the initial construction, Riot secured a $573 million interim financing facility from Morgan Stanley. The company is also working toward a longer-term investment-grade credit backstop for the development.
A Bitcoin Miner Accelerates Its AI Pivot
The Anthropic agreement would be Riot’s second major AI data center tenant at Rockdale. In January, the company signed a deal with AMD and has since expanded that relationship to 50 MW of contracted capacity.
Together, the AMD lease and the newly disclosed frontier AI agreement give Riot 241 MW of contracted critical IT capacity and approximately $9.8 billion in long-term contracted revenue.
The shift illustrates how bitcoin miners are repositioning infrastructure built for cryptocurrency mining as demand for AI compute rises. Mining sites already possess several resources that AI developers need, including grid connections, large power allocations, land, cooling expertise, and experience operating power-intensive computing equipment.
For Anthropic, the deal would add another source of capacity alongside its relationships with major cloud and infrastructure providers. The company’s infrastructure requirements are expanding rapidly as it competes with OpenAI, Google, Meta, and other frontier labs on increasingly compute-intensive models.
The timing is particularly notable because Anthropic is also preparing for a possible public listing. AIstify reported that the company has begun meeting investors ahead of a potential September or early October IPO, with its latest private financing valuing the business at $965 billion.
Such growth requires enormous capital commitments. A 20-year data center contract provides Anthropic with long-term access to infrastructure, but it also highlights how much future spending frontier AI companies are locking in before the economics of the industry have fully stabilized.
AI Demand Is Reshaping the Data Center Market
Riot’s deal comes during an unprecedented buildout of computing infrastructure across the United States. Technology companies, cloud providers, model developers, utilities, and former cryptocurrency miners are competing for sites capable of delivering hundreds of megawatts of power.
The expansion has also generated resistance. AIstify previously reported on coordinated protests against AI data centers across 42 US states, with local communities raising concerns about electricity demand, water consumption, land use, and utility costs.
Those constraints make existing powered sites particularly valuable. Riot’s Rockdale campus already has large-scale energy infrastructure, allowing the company to convert a facility associated with bitcoin mining into a long-term AI hosting business.
The market reaction showed how significant investors consider that transition. Riot shares jumped more than 25% in after-hours trading after the agreement became public, reversing a decline during the regular session.
For Riot, the contract could transform the economics of its business by adding decades of contracted data center revenue alongside its volatile bitcoin mining operations. For Anthropic, if Bloomberg’s identification of the customer is correct, the deal represents another multibillion-dollar commitment to the physical computing infrastructure needed to keep Claude at the frontier of AI development.
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