Bitcoin miner Riot Platforms has signed a 20-year compute deal with Anthropic worth $9 billion, or about 12.72 trillion won.

On Aug. 11, multiple foreign media outlets including CNBC reported that Anthropic will lease 191 megawatts (MW) of power at Riot’s Rockdale, Texas campus under the agreement. With demand for artificial intelligence (AI) computing surging, it secured scarce grid interconnection resources. Earlier, Riot said in a press release it had signed with a “leading frontier AI company” without naming it, and Bloomberg reported the company was Anthropic and the deal size was about $9 billion.

The agreement is seen as a turning point for Riot’s business structure, shifting from bitcoin mining to leasing AI infrastructure. Expected revenue over the 20-year term is $9.1 billion, or about 12.9 trillion won. If two five-year extension options are exercised, total revenue rises to about $16.1 billion, or about 22.8 trillion won.

The market reacted immediately. Riot shares jumped more than 20 percent after news of the deal but later gave back most of the gains. Securing a major AI customer is positive, but investors appear to have weighed when earnings will be reflected and the pace of the business shift. Riot shares are up more than 53 percent year-to-date, based on Yahoo Finance tallies. Riot is the world’s fourth-largest bitcoin miner, with a market capitalisation of $7.33 billion, or about 10.4 trillion won.

Riot has also signed a deal with AMD. In a report on Aug. 11, Compass Point analyst Michael Donovan (마이클 도너번) said Riot’s Rockdale base has become a “campus with two tenants” and that contracted data centre revenue totals $9.8 billion. Riot has become closer to a data centre operator supplying power and facilities than a single-purpose mining company.

Market views of bitcoin miners are also changing. They were once seen as a leveraged way to invest in the bitcoin price. But as AI demand surges and weakness in cryptocurrency prices drags on, investors have begun to put more weight on power capacity, data centre assets and energy contracts than on mining output. That is a backdrop to listed miners being re-rated as holders of digital infrastructure rather than producers of digital assets.

The shift accelerated from 2022, when cryptocurrency prices plunged. At the time, it was mainly small and mid-sized operators that struggled to withstand losses when bitcoin prices fell below mining costs. Mining costs include electricity, equipment and operating expenses. With mining competition intensifying and rewards also falling because of bitcoin’s four-year halving cycle, miners have faced pressure to find other revenue sources as profitability worsens.

If miners transform into AI infrastructure operators, investors can ride growing AI demand without betting on which AI model or application will be the ultimate winner. That is because assets AI companies commonly need are power, compute capacity and physical facilities.

In the current market, Cipher Mining, Hut 8 and TeraWulf are classified as hybrid miners. Riot, by contrast, has been seen as having a strong pure-mining character along with Mara Holdings and CleanSpark. The deal is read as a signal that Riot has also joined the same shift. Bitdeer, Core Scientific and IREN are also expanding into AI and high-performance computing (HPC).

Anthropic also signed a 20-year data centre lease deal with TeraWulf worth $19 billion, or about 26.9 trillion won, on July 6. Bernstein said in a report on July 23 that cooperation between AI companies and bitcoin miners is needed to ease power shortages that constrain AI data centres.

A key issue going forward is competition to secure power. Donovan said the Texas grid operator ERCOT is reviewing new power projects more strictly, adding: “It can slow the pace of speculative projects moving through the queue, but it does not reduce tenant demand for large-scale power in the short term.” He said the scarcity of approved power capacity could instead increase its strategic value. Compass Point maintained a buy rating on Riot and a target price of $29.