Anthropic will lease $9.1 billion in data center capacity from Riot Platforms, a Bitcoin mining company redirecting part of its Texas power toward AI compute. The Decoder reported the terms on August 11, 2026, citing Bloomberg, which cited people with direct knowledge of the arrangement. Riot revealed the agreement in its quarterly earnings a day earlier without naming the client, calling it only a “leading frontier AI lab.”
Riot will supply 191 megawatts of power from its Rockdale, Texas facility, an amount Bloomberg estimated could run roughly 143,000 homes. The contract spans 20 years, and two extension options, if exercised, would bring the deal’s ceiling up to $16.1 billion. Power arrives in two phases: 96 megawatts online by December 2027, with the remainder following in June 2028.
Riot handles the physical build: the facility shell, electrical connections, cooling systems, and day-to-day site operations, all constructed to Anthropic’s specifications. Anthropic supplies the servers and chips itself.
The Rockdale lease joins a fast-expanding set of Anthropic infrastructure agreements. SpaceX is collecting roughly $1.25 billion a month through May 2029 tied to the Colossus 1 site, and Anthropic separately committed to bringing two gigawatts of AMD chips online. Amazon’s partnership, worth up to $25 billion, covers roughly five gigawatts of Trainium chips. Google and Broadcom are supplying gigawatts of TPU capacity starting in 2027, and Volta Infra, a compute startup, holds a separate six-year deal valued near $10 billion.
The common thread across these deals is not chip supply. It is power already connected to the grid. Bitcoin miners such as Riot hold interconnection agreements and energized megawatts that typically take years to secure, the actual constraint on new AI capacity right now. Rockdale had that infrastructure in place well before Anthropic signed a lease on it.
Riot is not the first mining company to make this pivot. Bitcoin miners have spent the past several years converting sites toward AI and high-performance hosting as mining margins compressed, since a mining rig and an AI cluster draw on the same underlying asset: cheap, already-energized power at scale. That overlap is why crypto miners keep surfacing as counterparties in frontier lab compute deals, even though their core business has nothing to do with AI.
Read against that backdrop, the deal also answers a question weighing on frontier labs’ investors: how to keep adding compute without the permitting fights and local opposition that new construction invites. Leasing already energized capacity from a converted mining site is one answer, since it skips the construction start and years of interconnection queue time that a new site would require.
Neither company disclosed how much additional capacity remains at Rockdale for other tenants, or whether Anthropic can exercise the extension options on its own. Those terms decide whether Riot becomes a recurring AI landlord or whether this lease marks the ceiling of the relationship.
For operators tracking the compute buildout, the signal worth watching is the seller, not the price tag. Expect more leases with energy-heavy industrials, crypto miners chief among them, as frontier labs bid for energized power rather than wait on new construction timelines.
The Decoder, August 11, 2026.
