Riot Platforms, one of the largest publicly traded bitcoin miners, has signed a 20-year, roughly $9.1 billion agreement to supply computing capacity to artificial intelligence developer Anthropic, sending its shares sharply higher and underscoring the industry’s pivot from cryptocurrency toward AI infrastructure.
The deal ranks among the largest compute commitments struck by a former crypto-mining firm and hands Anthropic long-term access to data center capacity at a moment of surging demand for AI training and inference power.
Riot’s stock jumped following the announcement, as investors bet that the company’s vast energy footprint and existing facilities could be repurposed to serve high-margin AI workloads rather than volatile bitcoin production.
The agreement reflects a broader shift underway across the mining sector. Firms that built out enormous power capacity to mine bitcoin are increasingly leasing or converting that infrastructure to host AI computing, a business viewed as more stable and less exposed to swings in cryptocurrency prices.
For Anthropic, the maker of the Claude family of AI models, securing two decades of dedicated compute capacity addresses one of the sector’s most pressing bottlenecks: access to the power and hardware needed to train and run ever-larger models. The company has been in an aggressive expansion phase, having earlier explored a major funding round that valued the firm at around $170 billion.
The size and length of the arrangement have also fueled speculation about Anthropic’s financial trajectory, with some market watchers reading the commitment as a signal that the AI developer is positioning itself for an eventual public listing.
The transaction adds to a wave of large-scale capital flowing into AI data centers and the energy needed to run them, as technology companies race to lock in capacity years in advance. Power availability, rather than chips alone, has emerged as a defining constraint on the industry’s growth.
Riot has spent recent years building out sites with substantial electricity access, an asset that now positions the company to compete for AI hosting contracts alongside dedicated data center operators.
The deal is expected to reshape Riot’s revenue mix over its multi-decade term, diversifying the company away from a business long tied to bitcoin’s price cycles. Whether other miners follow with comparable agreements will be a closely watched test of how durable the crypto-to-AI transition proves to be.