A Bitcoin Miner Just Signed a $9.1B, 20-Year Lease With Anthropic

Riot Platforms — a company that mines Bitcoin — just became one of Anthropic’s biggest infrastructure landlords. On August 10, Riot announced a 20-year, $9.1 billion lease for 191 megawatts of capacity at its Rockdale, Texas campus, identifying the tenant only as “one of the world’s leading frontier AI labs.” Bloomberg named Anthropic hours later, citing people familiar with the deal.

The terms: the lease runs through June 2048, delivery is phased with the first 96MW landing in December 2027 and the full 191MW complete by June 2028, and Morgan Stanley is providing $573 million in interim financing to bridge construction. If Anthropic exercises two five-year extension options, total contract value climbs to $16.1 billion. Combined with Riot’s earlier AI hosting deal with AMD at the same campus, Riot has now locked in 241MW and roughly $9.8 billion in long-term contracted revenue from two of the biggest names in AI compute — without mining a single Bitcoin for either of them.

This is the second Anthropic infrastructure deal in a week. On August 10, Anthropic also launched Theseus Infrastructure, an equity venture with Macquarie Asset Management and GIC that builds and owns data centers with Anthropic as anchor tenant — a financing structure, not a specific site. The Riot deal is the opposite: a direct, dollar-denominated lease at a named campus with a named landlord. Together they show Anthropic pursuing compute capacity through every available structure simultaneously — equity joint ventures for scale, direct leases for speed — rather than betting on one financing model.

For Riot, the pivot is existential rather than opportunistic. Bitcoin mining margins compress every halving cycle, and miners sit on exactly the asset AI labs are short on: grid-connected power at scale, already permitted and built. Riot’s stock has moved on the AI narrative for over a year; this lease converts that narrative into contracted cash flow through 2048. It’s the same trade Core Scientific, Cipher Mining, and other former Bitcoin miners have made over the past 18 months, and it’s becoming the fastest path to new AI data center capacity — faster than building from bare land, because the power infrastructure already exists.

For Anthropic, it’s another data point in a buildout pattern that now spans equity ventures, direct leases, and — as of last week — an in-house chip design team aimed at cutting Nvidia dependency. The company is securing every layer of the stack it doesn’t control, at a pace that suggests its compute needs are growing faster than any single financing structure can satisfy.

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