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Claude’s developer has signed a 2,000-year, $9.1 billion deal with Riot Platforms – a Texas-based Bitcoin miner that is actively transitioning into a provider of computing power for AI.
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Anthropic has signed yet another large-scale deal to meet its own enormous computing power needs, and this time its partner is a company that, until recently, made its money mining Bitcoin.
This 20-year agreement is valued at $9.1 billion and provides the creator of Claude with a significant amount of resources at the Riot Platforms facility in Texas. The facility is currently undergoing an intensive transformation from a crypto mining operation into a site for leasing AI computing power. The deal marks another step in a series of massive infrastructure contracts the lab is signing to secure access to the necessary equipment.
The contract is valid through June 2048 and includes the option to extend it twice for an additional 5 years each time. If both options are exercised, the total value of the deal will rise to $16.1 billion, transforming the agreement from a standard lease into a long-term partnership between a cutting-edge AI lab and a former mining company.
In exchange for this investment, Anthropic will receive 191 MW of IT capacity on the Riot Platforms campus in Rockdale, to be delivered in phases. Riot Platforms expects to have 96 MW operational by December 2027 and the full 191 MW by June 2028. This timeline is unofficially based on the assumption that the rapid pace of data center construction in Texas will remain steady.
To implement the project, Riot Platforms is drawing on resources from Wall Street. Morgan Stanley is providing $573 million in bridge financing to cover the costs of developing the site. Such advance loans have already become common practice in an environment where AI’s energy demands outpace the available financial reserves of companies competing to meet them.
Investors reacted positively to the news. Riot Platforms’ shares rose by approximately 25% in over-the-counter trading on August 10, reaching around $24.30. This reaction demonstrates both the market’s general enthusiasm for anything related to AI and its assessment of the details of the deal itself. A guaranteed stream of payments over 20 years from a financially stable client appears to be a much more reliable prospect than the volatility of Bitcoin’s price.
The company acting as the lessor is a rather atypical player for this market. Riot Platforms has historically been involved in Bitcoin mining and has achieved significant results in this area, mining 1,587 Bitcoin in the second quarter of 2026 alone. However, it is now repositioning itself as a real estate operator for computing systems.
CEO Jason Les noted that over the past six months, the company has signed lease agreements totaling 241 MW of capacity, which will generate approximately $9.8 billion in long-term contracted revenue from leading AI players.
This shift in focus is not unique to Riot Platforms. A number of former Bitcoin miners have realized that their large-scale, energy-intensive facilities, built for block mining, are ideally suited for training and running AI models. As a result, they have quickly pivoted to leasing this capacity to anyone interested.
For Anthropic, the practice of using third-party data centers for its own tasks has already become routine.
For the developer of Claude, this logic makes sense, though its scale is impressive. Anthropic is signing computing agreements at a pace that would have seemed unimaginable just two years ago. It is signing multi-billion contracts with cloud providers, chip manufacturers, and now crypto miners, striving to secure capacity ahead of its competitors.
Demand for its models is constantly growing, and the only way to meet it is to continuously buy, lease, and reserve silicon resources wherever they are available – even in converted hangars that once housed crypto enterprises.
There is a distinct irony in this situation. The energy that was previously spent on creating digital coins is now being directed toward building digital intelligence, and those very hangars with their humming machines are now working for a new owner.
Whether these 20-year investments will pay off in 2048, when the current wave of hype is nothing more than a memory, is a question that the contract signatories are not yet eager to answer.