Anthropic has signed a $9.1 billion deal with Riot Platforms to use the bitcoin miner's data center infrastructure for AI compute, according to The Decoder.
What Happened
The agreement will convert part of Riot Platforms' cryptocurrency mining operations into AI training and inference capacity. Riot operates large-scale mining facilities primarily in Texas, where it has been building out power infrastructure for its bitcoin mining operations. Financial terms call for Anthropic to commit to long-term capacity reservations at the sites. The deal is structured as a multi-year agreement with staged deployments as facilities are retrofitted.
Why It Matters
The partnership reflects growing competition among AI labs to lock up compute resources amid an industry-wide shortage of data center power and hardware. Converting bitcoin mining infrastructure for AI use represents a potential template for other cryptocurrency miners seeking to repurpose assets as crypto mining profitability has faced pressure from regulatory uncertainty and market volatility. For Anthropic, the deal provides a path to expanded inference capacity without requiring the company to build its own facilities from scratch.
The Bottom Line
Anthropic's $9.1 billion commitment to Riot Platforms represents one of the larger infrastructure agreements in the AI sector this year. The bitcoin miner gains a long-term tenant for facilities that might otherwise sit underutilized as cryptocurrency mining economics shift.