Riot Platforms agreed to provide 191 megawatts of compute capacity to Anthropic under a 20-year deal valued at $9.1 billion, according to the company's Q2 2026 earnings announcement on August 10. Deployment will occur in stages: 96 megawatts by December 2027 and the full 191 megawatts by June 2028, with the agreement running through June 2048.
Riot operates some of the largest bitcoin mining facilities in North America. The company is now carving out significant capacity for artificial intelligence workloads, where pricing per megawatt often exceeds mining economics.
Anthropc, backed by Google and Amazon among others, requires substantial computational resources to train and run large language models. The company has been acquiring computing capacity from cloud providers and now directly from infrastructure operators like Riot. A 191-megawatt facility would rank among the largest dedicated AI compute centers in operation.
Riot's staged deployment timeline means 96 megawatts enters service within 16 months. The company did not disclose which of its existing facilities will be retasked or where new infrastructure will be built to support the additional load. Riot operates data centers in Texas, Arkansas and other states with access to abundant power.
The $9.1 billion valuation works out to roughly $47.6 million per megawatt of annual capacity over the 20-year term. That pricing sits above typical rates for colocation or cloud compute in tight markets but accounts for long-term commitment and dedicated hardware configuration for large language model inference and training.
Riot stock surged 20 percent in pre-market trading following the announcement, according to market data. The deal comes as bitcoin miners face pressure from rising electricity costs and competition from AI companies bidding for the same power supplies. Several mining operators have begun exploring energy arbitrage models where they toggle between mining and renting capacity to AI firms depending on relative pricing.
At 191 megawatts, the Anthropic capacity equals roughly 15 percent of Riot's total nameplate mining capacity as of mid-2026. If fully deployed by June 2028, the shift would represent one of the largest single reallocations of bitcoin mining infrastructure to AI compute in the sector's history. The contract's 20-year duration locks in Anthropic's access through 2048 and commits Riot to sustain operations at that capacity level regardless of cryptocurrency price movements.
