Anthropic Is Renting a Bitcoin Mine for 20 Years, and Promising to Pay Your Electricity Increase
A 9.1 billion dollar lease at a former crypto site in Texas, plus a new joint venture that builds data centres to order. The unusual bit is the pledge about consumer power bills.
Anthropic has signed a 9.1 billion dollar data centre deal with Riot Platforms, a company that until recently was best known for mining Bitcoin. According to Bloomberg, the contract covers 191 megawatts at Riot’s Rockdale site in Texas, roughly the electricity draw of 143,000 homes. Riot builds the shell, the power connections, the cooling and the operations; Anthropic brings its own servers and chips. The lease runs 20 years with two extension options that could take the total to 16.1 billion dollars. The first 96 megawatts are due in December 2027.
That is the second infrastructure announcement from Anthropic in two days. On Monday it launched Theseus Infrastructure with Macquarie Asset Management and Singapore’s sovereign fund GIC, a vehicle that will build and own data centres purpose built for Anthropic, with Anthropic as the long term anchor tenant and Macquarie and GIC funding most of the equity. No dollar figure was disclosed. Both deals point the same direction: rather than renting whatever capacity a cloud provider has spare, Anthropic is arranging for buildings to be constructed to its specification.
The list this joins is already long. Anthropic pays SpaceX an estimated 1.25 billion dollars a month for the Colossus 1 data centre through May 2029, plans two gigawatts of AMD graphics chips, has Amazon investing up to 25 billion dollars and building up to five gigawatts of Trainium capacity, has a multi gigawatt deal with Google and Broadcom from 2027, and a six year, 10 billion dollar contract with the cloud startup Volta Infra. Reports this week put total compute commitments at roughly 71 billion dollars. That is the arithmetic behind a company reportedly approaching 60 billion dollars in annual recurring revenue and reportedly preparing to go public.
One clause deserves more attention than the numbers. With Theseus, Anthropic committed to paying 100 percent of grid upgrade costs and to covering consumer electricity price increases tied to its own data centre demand. As far as we can tell that is the first such pledge from a frontier AI lab, and it addresses the objection that has been sinking data centre planning applications across the United States: that neighbours end up subsidising the power bill. Whether it holds up in practice depends on details nobody has published yet.
What this means for you: if you live near a proposed data centre, that electricity pledge is the sentence to hold Anthropic to, and the one to ask other companies about. For everyone else, this is the cost side of the tools you use. A 20 year lease is a bet that demand for Claude will still be there in 2047, and a fixed cost that has to be paid out of subscriptions and API bills whether or not it is. Long leases are also why AI companies keep nudging prices upward rather than down.
Sources
Everything Claude Writes Now Carries a Hidden Mark, Everywhere in the World
Anthropic will embed invisible watermarks in Claude's text and sign generated files with C2PA metadata. The company is unusually clear about what the marks cannot tell you.
