Anthropic has secured data center capacity from Bitcoin miner Riot Platforms in Texas for $9.1 billion, according to Bloomberg. The contract covers 191 megawatts at the Rockdale site—enough power for roughly 143,000 US households. With two extension options, the total value could reach $16.1 billion. Riot announced the deal alongside its quarterly earnings, but initially identified the tenant only as a "leading frontier AI lab."
Quick Facts
- Term: 20 years; first 96 megawatts operational December 2027, remainder by June 2028
- Riot's role: Builds facility, provides power connection, cooling, and operations; Anthropic supplies servers and AI chips
- Broader portfolio: Anthropic is investing in parallel infrastructure deals with SpaceX, Amazon, Google, and others
- Energy scale: Equivalent to powering approximately 143,000 US households
Anthropic's Aggressive Infrastructure Push
The Riot deal is just one piece of Anthropic's massive expansion strategy. The company pays SpaceX an estimated $1.25 billion per month through May 2029 for the Colossus 1 data center, planning to deploy AMD GPUs there. In parallel, Amazon is investing up to $25 billion and building up to five gigawatts of Trainium capacity with Anthropic. Add gigawatts of TPU capacity from Google and Broadcom starting 2027, plus a six-year $10 billion contract with Volta Infra.
| Partner | Investment | Technology | Launch |
|---|---|---|---|
| Riot Platforms | $9.1B | 191 MW | Dec 2027 |
| SpaceX | ~$1.25B/month | AMD GPUs | through May 2029 |
| Amazon | up to $25B | Trainium | ongoing |
| Volta Infra | $10B | – | 6 years |
Why Partner with a Bitcoin Miner?
Riot Platforms already operates data centers with massive power capacity—infrastructure Bitcoin mining demands. Anthropic taps into that expertise and existing energy connections to scale faster. Riot builds to Anthropic's specifications but only provides infrastructure; Anthropic must source the expensive AI chips itself. This limits Riot's financial risk on hardware investments.
What This Means for European Companies
Anthropic's strategy highlights a fundamental challenge for European AI developers: available computing power concentrates in the US, where energy costs and infrastructure are cheaper. German and European companies must either negotiate similar long-term US contracts or focus on specialized tasks that don't require massive GPU capacity. At the same time, Anthropic's investment velocity shows the race for compute is intensifying—companies that don't scale early risk falling behind.
Sources
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