Anthropic has locked in one of the largest AI compute deals of 2026, signing a 20-year, $9.1 billion agreement with Bitcoin miner Riot Platforms for 191 megawatts of capacity at Riot's Rockdale, Texas campus. Riot disclosed the contract on August 11, 2026, calling it "transformational." Bloomberg identified Anthropic as the previously unnamed frontier AI tenant.
From hash rates to Claude
The lease runs through June 2048, with 96 MW live in December 2027 and the full 191 MW online by June 2028. Two five-year extensions could push total contract revenue to $16.1 billion. Riot has secured a $573 million construction facility from Morgan Stanley while it finalizes long-term financing. RIOT shares surged more than 20% pre-market on the news, and Wall Street analysts called the pivot a full-scale reidentification away from pure Bitcoin mining.
Rockdale becomes a two-tenant AI campus
The Anthropic deal joins an existing AMD agreement at Rockdale, meaning the site now carries roughly $9.8 billion of contracted AI/HPC revenue against Riot's 700 MW of energized, fiber-connected capacity. For Anthropic, the contract underlines just how much physical infrastructure Claude's training and serving workloads now require, mirroring hyperscaler-scale power procurement rather than typical cloud rentals.
Crypto grids reborn as AI factories
Riot's deal is the clearest example yet of a broader shift: crypto miners already own the land, substations, cooling and grid interconnects that AI companies desperately need — assets that take years to obtain from scratch. That is helping formerly bitcoin-first operators convert into long-duration compute landlords with predictable, investment-grade revenue. See related: NVIDIA's $500B Wall Street compute-financing pact, Olix Computing's photonic AI raise, and Microsoft's Maia 300 chip roadmap.
Reporting based on coverage from Riot Platforms, Bloomberg, CNBC, Quartz and CoinDesk.