Anthropic has agreed to a $9.1 billion deal with Riot Platforms, according to people familiar with the matter, the latest sign that AI labs are locking up computing capacity years ahead of need and that bitcoin miners are finding a lucrative second act.
Riot, a bitcoin miner that recently began selling AI data-center capacity, disclosed early Monday that it had reached a 20-year agreement to provide 191 megawatts of power capacity from its campus in Rockdale, Texas to a “leading frontier AI company.” People familiar with the arrangement identified the customer as Anthropic, the AI company backed by Amazon and Google. Riot’s shares jumped about 25% in after-hours trading after the announcement, a move that reflected both the size of the deal and the market’s hunger for AI-linked revenue in the mining sector.
The transaction pairs two industries whose needs line up almost perfectly. Anthropic needs enormous amounts of electricity to train and run its models, and it needs it for decades, not quarters. Riot owns land, power infrastructure and one of the largest bitcoin-mining operations in North America, assets that generate thin margins when used to mine cryptocurrency but far richer returns when rented to an AI customer. For Riot, the deal transforms a commodity business into a landlord business; for Anthropic, it locks in power at a time when data-center capacity is scarce and utility connections can take years to secure.
The Rockdale campus is central to the story. Built around a former aluminum smelter, the site has its own substations and long-term power agreements, infrastructure that miners spent years assembling during the cryptocurrency boom. Re-purposing that capacity for AI is faster than building new, and Rockdale’s location in Texas, with its deregulated power market and abundant wind and solar generation, makes it attractive to compute buyers who need flexible, dispatchable electricity. Riot has said it is in talks with other potential AI customers for additional capacity, though no further agreements have been announced.
The deal is the largest in a series of partnerships between crypto miners and AI companies, a trend that began in earnest in 2023 when struggling miners, their revenue squeezed by falling bitcoin prices, started marketing their power and facilities to data-center operators. CoreWeave and other cloud providers have struck similar arrangements with miners, and analysts said the Riot-Anthropic agreement could encourage more. “Miners own the scarcest asset in AI: reliable, contracted power,” one analyst said. “The market is finally pricing that properly.”
For Anthropic, the 20-year commitment is part of a broader strategy of securing capacity far in advance. The company has announced plans to build data centers with partners and has signed long-term agreements with cloud providers, all aimed at avoiding the compute shortages that have periodically slowed its product launches. The Riot deal gives Anthropic a direct stake in power infrastructure, a hedge against rising electricity costs and a guarantee of supply at a fixed site.
The deal also marks a shift in how bitcoin miners are being valued. For most of their history, miners traded on the price of bitcoin and the cost of electricity, a formula that punished them during crypto winters and left their vast infrastructure, land, substations, buildings, largely unrecognized. That began to change as AI companies ran out of power options, and miners from Texas to North Dakota started marketing their sites as data-center real estate. Core Scientific, Iris Energy and TeraWulf have all signed AI-related deals, and analysts said Riot’s agreement, by far the largest, could re-rate the entire sector. “The market is starting to value miners for their power, not just their coins,” one sector analyst said.
The risks are real. Delivering 191 megawatts of reliable power requires upgrades to the Rockdale campus, and the timeline for those improvements is uncertain. Power markets in Texas have been tested by heat waves and grid emergencies, and any interruption would ripple through Anthropic’s training schedules. The deal also carries regulatory risk: Texas officials have scrutinized power deals involving crypto miners, and the state’s grid operator keeps a close watch on large loads. Riot and Anthropic said the agreement is subject to standard conditions, including the completion of interconnection work.
For the Texas power grid, the deal is a test of how much load the state can absorb. Texas has become the country’s largest market for new data centers, drawn by deregulation, cheap wind and solar, and a grid operator that clears new connections quickly. But the state has also warned that demand growth is outpacing generation, and large loads like Riot’s campus must prove they can curtail when the grid is stressed. Rockdale sits in an area with substantial transmission capacity, a legacy of the smelter that once ran there, which eased the interconnection path. The arrangement includes commitments to shed load during emergencies, standard for industrial users but watched closely when the customer is a frontier AI company with round-the-clock training jobs.
The deal’s implications extend beyond the two companies. It signals that the AI build-out is now reaching into every corner of the energy system, from utility-scale solar farms to former smelters in rural Texas. It also illustrates how quickly capital is following compute: when a bitcoin miner can command a valuation jump of 25% on a single contract, the message to other miners, and to any company with surplus power, is clear. The scarcity that defined the AI chip market is now defining the power market too, and the winners will be whoever controls the electrons.
