A Bitcoin Miner Becomes Anthropic's Newest Landlord

The company that will soon house a slice of Anthropic's computing power spent the last decade mining bitcoin. On 11 August, Riot Platforms said it had signed a 20-year deal to supply the AI lab with 191 megawatts of capacity from its campus in Rockdale, Texas, an agreement worth about $9.1 billion over its life. Investors liked it: Riot shares jumped more than 20 percent before US markets opened.

The terms, first reported by CNBC and Bloomberg, run long. The $9.1 billion covers two decades and would climb to roughly $16.1 billion if Anthropic takes up two further five-year extensions. Riot expects to deliver an initial 96 megawatts in December 2027 and reach full deployment by June 2028. To put 191 megawatts in perspective, that is enough electricity to power around 143,000 homes at any given moment.

From coins to compute

Riot's pivot is not a one-off. Across the sector, bitcoin miners are turning into AI landlords, and the logic is straightforward. Mining companies spent years securing exactly what AI now craves, which is large sites with cheap power and grid connections already in place. Renting that capacity to a lab brings steadier, contracted income than mining, where revenue swings with the price of a volatile asset.

Riot chief executive Jason Les said the Anthropic deal, together with an earlier agreement, brings the company's total signed capacity to 241 megawatts and roughly $9.8 billion in long-term contracted revenue.

For Anthropic, the deal is another move in a long campaign to lock down the electricity and floor space its models need. The lab has already committed to a $10 billion compute arrangement in Norway and set up a data-centre venture that promises to absorb local power costs. Buying capacity from a firm that already owns the land and the substations is faster than building from scratch.

The power problem, again

Underneath all of this sits the same constraint that keeps shaping the industry. The bottleneck for AI is no longer the supply of chips but the supply of electricity to run them, a shift we examined when power became the real ceiling on AI. Deals like this one are a scramble for megawatts as much as for square footage. It arrived the same week that Nvidia lined up $500 billion in Wall Street financing for much the same purpose, which tells you how much capital and current the build-out is now swallowing.