📰 Key Takeaways

Anthropic has reportedly struck a roughly $9 billion deal with bitcoin miner Riot Platforms spanning a 20-year term, under which Riot’s campus in Rockdale, Texas will supply 191 megawatts (MW) of compute capacity for Anthropic’s AI business. The news first surfaced in a Riot press release on Monday, which didn’t name the client, but Bloomberg cited people familiar with the matter confirming the partner is Anthropic — Cointelegraph has reached out to both companies for comment but hasn’t received a response yet. Notably, this isn’t Anthropic’s first tie-up with a bitcoin miner: on July 6 the company signed a separate $19 billion, also 20-year, data center lease with miner TeraWulf. That puts Riot on a growing list of bitcoin miners branching into AI and high-performance computing, alongside Bitdeer, CleanSpark, MARA Holdings, Core Scientific, Hut 8, and IREN. Riot’s stock fell as much as 5.4% on Monday after the news broke, but rebounded more than 21% in after-hours trading, bringing its year-to-date gain to over 53%. Riot is currently the world’s fourth-largest bitcoin mining company, with a market cap of roughly $7.33 billion. Research firm Bernstein noted in a report on July 23 that partnerships between AI companies and bitcoin miners are one necessary path to solving the power shortage bottleneck currently facing AI data centers.

💬 JudyAI Lab Take

Anthropic has reportedly signed a roughly $9 billion, 20-year compute partnership with bitcoin miner Riot Platforms, with 191MW of compute capacity from Riot’s Rockdale, Texas campus backing its AI business. The deal underscores once again how AI giants are bypassing traditional data centers and going straight to miners sitting on power resources to solve their compute expansion bottleneck.

This isn’t the first time Anthropic has turned to a bitcoin miner — just in July it signed a $19 billion, also 20-year, data center lease with TeraWulf. Riot joins a growing list that includes Bitdeer, CleanSpark, MARA, Core Scientific, Hut 8, and IREN, showing the bitcoin mining industry is aggressively repositioning itself as an AI compute supplier. Research firm Bernstein already flagged earlier that these kinds of partnerships are one necessary way to solve the power shortage constraining AI data centers. For AI builders, this reflects a reality: the competition in model training and inference is expanding from “whose algorithm is better” to “who can secure stable power.”

Worth thinking about: as your AI project scales up to need serious compute, access to power and infrastructure could become a bottleneck sooner than your choice of model.

📅 Source Info

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