Anthropic Signs $9.1 Billion Data Center Deal With Bitcoin Miner

From Bitcoin Mine to AI Data Center

A mining facility in Rockdale, Texas is set to support Anthropic's AI compute needs for the next 20 years. According to Bloomberg, which cited people familiar with the matter, Anthropic has signed a $9.1 billion data center lease agreement with bitcoin mining company Riot Platforms. If both extension options are exercised, the total value of the deal could grow to $16.1 billion.

The way the news came out is notable. Riot first disclosed the deal a day earlier during its quarterly earnings call, without naming the tenant — describing it only as a "leading frontier AI lab." It was only through Bloomberg's reporting that the counterparty was revealed to be Anthropic.

Deal Details

The agreement covers 191 megawatts at Riot's Rockdale site — roughly enough power for 143,000 households. Under the reported structure, Riot will handle the building, power connections, cooling systems, and operations, while Anthropic will bring in its own servers and AI chips. Rather than taking over the mining facility as-is, a new facility will be built to Anthropic's specifications.

The rollout will happen in phases: 96 megawatts is scheduled to come online in December 2027, with the remainder following by June 2028.

Mapping Anthropic's Infrastructure Expansion

This deal is part of a series of infrastructure agreements Anthropic has struck over the past year. Sorted by scale:

Partner	Deal Terms	Notes
Riot Platforms	$9.1B (up to $16.1B with extensions) bar:57	Rockdale, Texas, 191MW, 20 years
Amazon	Up to $25B bar:100	Up to 5GW of Trainium buildout
Volta Infrastructure	$10B (6 years) bar:63	-
SpaceX	$1.25B/month (through May 2029)	Colossus 1 data center, plans to deploy 2GW of AMD GPUs
Google/Broadcom	Undisclosed scale	TPU capacity, phased rollout starting 2027

As the table shows, the Amazon deal is the largest by dollar value, but the Riot agreement ranks second when the expansion options are factored in. It illustrates Anthropic's clear strategy of diversifying its compute supply across multiple partners.

Why Bring In a Bitcoin Miner

It may seem unusual for an AI company to lease facilities from a crypto mining firm, but the logic is straightforward. Bitcoin mining sites already have large-scale grid connections and cooling infrastructure in place, allowing them to come online faster than new construction. New grid connections in the US typically take years to secure, and existing mining facilities offer a shortcut around that bottleneck. Beyond Riot, several other mining companies are reportedly pivoting their businesses toward leasing sites and power to AI firms.

Anthropic's aggressive push to lock down infrastructure is also tied to its custom chip strategy. As confirmed on August 8, Anthropic officially formed a custom silicon team to design chips specifically for its Claude models. The company plans to maintain a "multi-chip strategy," running its own custom silicon alongside AMD, Google TPUs, and Amazon Trainium hardware in parallel. The Riot agreement can be seen as part of the power and site acquisition needed to support that multi-chip strategy.

What This Means

This deal underscores how the center of gravity in the generative AI race is shifting from model performance to securing power and physical sites. With competitors like OpenAI, Google, and Meta announcing similarly large infrastructure deals, AI companies' competitiveness going forward may depend as much on how reliably they can secure power and compute as on their models themselves. This agreement — leasing a mining facility to sidestep grid bottlenecks — signals that the race for AI infrastructure is reshaping the broader energy infrastructure industry.