Bitcoin miner turned AI infrastructure provider Riot Platforms has reportedly landed Anthropic as the tenant behind a $9.1 billion, 20-year data center lease.
Riot announced Monday that an unnamed “leading frontier AI lab” had leased 191 megawatts of critical IT capacity at its Rockdale, Texas, campus. Bloomberg later identified the customer as Anthropic, citing people familiar with the matter.
The agreement runs through June 2048 and includes two optional five-year extensions that could raise its total value to approximately $16.1 billion.
What the agreement includes
Riot will provide a build-to-suit Tier 3 data center at its Rockdale campus. The first 96 megawatts are expected to be delivered in December 2027, with the full 191 megawatts scheduled to come online by June 2028, the company said. To support construction, Riot secured a $573 million interim financing facility from Morgan Stanley.
“Today’s announcement of a landmark 20-year, 191-megawatt data center lease with a leading frontier AI lab marks a defining moment in our evolution into a leading developer of large-scale data centers,” Riot CEO Jason Les said in a statement.
The new lease follows Riot’s earlier agreement with Advanced Micro Devices, giving the company a total of 241 megawatts of contracted AI data center capacity at the Rockdale site.
The bigger race for compute
The deal highlights how aggressively AI companies are competing for power and computing capacity. Bloomberg reported that Anthropic has signed several large infrastructure agreements in recent months, including a $10 billion deal with Volta Infrastructure Holdings and a separate agreement to purchase nearly $45 billion worth of computing power from xAI.
For Riot, the agreement underscores a broader industry shift. Bitcoin miners own large amounts of land, power connections, cooling infrastructure and electrical capacity — assets that have become increasingly valuable as AI data centers compete for access to electricity.
Riot’s second-quarter results reflected that transition. The company reported $174.2 million in revenue, up 14% from a year earlier, including $23.2 million in data center revenue.
What this signals next
This agreement suggests the AI infrastructure race is expanding beyond traditional cloud providers. Companies that can deliver ready-to-use power, cooling and land may become critical partners for AI developers, regardless of whether they previously operated in crypto, energy or industrial infrastructure.
For investors and technology companies, the more important signal may be that access to electricity is becoming a competitive advantage. Anthropic is not simply leasing data center space; it is securing long-term access to scarce, grid-connected IT capacity years before many new facilities can be completed.
The challenge is that these contracts require massive upfront investment and long construction timelines, leaving both landlords and AI tenants exposed to changes in technology, energy markets and future demand.
Read more: Amazon’s 7.65GW Texas gas plant shows how AI’s growth is driving demand for dedicated power infrastructure.