Anthropic leases data center from Bitcoin miner Riot for $9.1 billion

Anthropic is leasing data center capacity from Bitcoin miner Riot Platforms for $9.1 billion, according to Bloomberg citing insiders. Riot announced the contract a day earlier with its quarterly results but only referred to the tenant as a 'leading frontier AI laboratory'. The deal covers 191 megawatts at the Rockdale, Texas site, enough to power about 143,000 households. Riot will build the data center according to the tenant's specifications and provide the building, power connection, cooling, and operations, while Anthropic will supply its own servers and AI chips. The contract runs for 20 years, with two extension options that could bring the value to $16.1 billion. The first 96 megawatts are expected to be operational in December 2027, with the rest in June 2028. This deal is part of a series of capacity agreements for Anthropic: it reportedly pays SpaceX $1.25 billion per month until May 2029 for the Colossus 1 data center, plans to deploy two gigawatts of AMD GPUs, Amazon is investing up to $25 billion and building up to five gigawatts of Trainium capacity with Anthropic, plus gigawatts of TPU capacity from Google and Broadcom starting in 2027 and a six-year, $10 billion contract with Volta Infra.