Anthropic signs $9.1B AI compute deal with bitcoin miner Riot Platforms

Anthropic has signed a 20-year compute supply agreement with Riot Platforms, a bitcoin mining company, in a deal valued at $9.1 billion. Riot will supply 191 megawatts of computing capacity from its data center campus in Rockdale, Texas — roughly the power load of 143,000 households.

The agreement takes effect at signing and runs until June 2048, with two five-year renewal options that could bring the potential total to $16.1 billion.

The deal is driven by Anthropic's compute crunch: surging demand for AI services has left the company needing to lock in long-term capacity. Bitcoin miners, sitting on large data center campuses and power contracts, have emerged as an unlikely but growing source of AI infrastructure.

For Riot Platforms, the agreement is a major step in its pivot from crypto mining toward AI and high-performance computing hosting. Power and land are hard constraints for training and running large models, and miner campuses come with both.

Markets reacted strongly: Riot shares jumped about 25% in after-hours trading after the announcement, a sign that investors see the contract as validation of the company's data center assets.

For Anthropic, the deal adds a predictable compute base for the next two decades, easing pressure on model training and service expansion. It also underscores how aggressively frontier AI labs are competing for premium compute capacity.

What to watch next: whether the 191 megawatts come online on schedule, whether Anthropic signs more deals of this scale, and whether the miner-lab pairing draws more scrutiny over energy use and regulation.