Anthropic just signed a $9.1 billion, 20-year deal with a former Bitcoin miner
Riot Platforms spent years mining crypto. Now it's renting out power to AI labs instead, and the numbers are enormous.
Anthropic has agreed to lease AI computing capacity from Riot Platforms in a deal that could bring in roughly $9.1 billion in revenue for Riot through 2048, with two five-year extension options that could push the total up to about $16.1 billion. Riot is supplying 191 megawatts of power from its Rockdale, Texas campus, the same large-scale power infrastructure it originally built for Bitcoin mining.
This is really a story about what's actually scarce in AI right now, and it isn't chips or ideas. It's electricity. Bitcoin miners already own exactly what AI companies need: huge amounts of contracted power in one place. Riot's stock jumped more than 20% in aftermarket trade on the news, which tells you the market sees this shift as more valuable than the crypto-mining business it's stepping away from. The more interesting story over the next few years might be how many other former crypto miners make the same pivot, since the infrastructure need barely changes.
Watch whether Anthropic's other reported compute talks, including a separate set of early discussions to lease around $10 billion in capacity from Meta, actually turn into signed deals. If they do, it's a sign AI labs are treating raw power capacity as something worth locking up years in advance, the same way they already do with chips.