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.
