Don’t Look Now, But Anthropic is Bypassing Hyperscalers

Don’t Look Now, But Anthropic is Bypassing Hyperscalers

Srividya Kalyanaraman

Tue, August 11, 2026 at 4:39 PM GMT+3 3 min read

THE GIST

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Anthropic needs electricity, and it has stopped being fussy about where the plug comes from. The frontier labs were supposed to get their compute from hyperscalers, which is how OpenAI and Microsoft still do it. Anthropic has instead spent the past week handing enormous, decades-long contracts to a Bitcoin miner in Texas and a Norwegian startup that did not exist in January.

WHAT HAPPENED

Anthropic locked in roughly $19 billion of new compute contracts inside a single week, split between a 20-year agreement with Riot Platforms worth $9 billion and a $10 billion arrangement with infrastructure startup Volta Infra Holdings.

Riot, a Texan Bitcoin mining company, disclosed a 20-year deal to supply 191 megawatts of capacity from its Rockdale, Texas campus, enough to power roughly 143,000 homes at any given moment.

Riot expects the contract to generate $9 billion in revenue, with 2 extension options of 5 years each that could push total value to $16 billion. Investors were delighted and pushed the stock up 25% in after-hours trading.

The Volta deal signed last week is structurally different. The 6-month-old startup will deliver compute from a hydro-powered data center in Norway, capacity pegged at 133 megawatts, with handoff occurring in 2 phases through March 2027.

WHY IT MATTERS

Both deals reveal Anthropic's strategy of bypassing hyperscalers to find compute wherever it exists. Riot Platforms began life as a diagnostics company before becoming a Bitcoin miner and then an AI host. Volta did not exist at the start of the year and today holds a $10 billion deal with a frontier AI lab.

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These are not no-name newbies, though. Volta was founded in January by former Brookfield Asset Management executives and had raised just $300 million across seed and Series A rounds, backed by Andreessen Horowitz, Altimeter, and Nvidia, before landing a $2.4 billion valuation.

Nvidia is both an investor in Volta and its chip supplier, which highlights the circulatory movement of capital in AI, where chipmakers, cloud startups, and labs increasingly fund each other's growth. Everyone should be asking where that money enters and exits, though that is a different story.

Riot has an eclectic past. It was founded as Bioptix, a biotech diagnostics company, before its dramatic turn to Bitcoin mining. It runs a large-scale operation out of Rockdale and has now layered AI data center hosting on top of the mining business. Q2 revenue came to $174 million, a 14% jump from the previous year, with Bitcoin mining contributing $113.7 million and data centers $23.2 million. Before anyone gets excited, the company is still in the red, with losses above $200 million.

It is also part of a larger migration of Bitcoin miners into AI hosting, and the supply and demand math is not complicated. Crypto miners are sitting on infrastructure that has become extremely attractive to AI labs racing to secure compute. Miners already hold grid connections and land that would otherwise take years to develop from scratch.

WHAT'S NEXT

Anthropic has not spoken openly about either deal, and confirmation would signal a strategy of spreading capacity across multiple vendors. Declining to lean on hyperscalers may yet prove the prudent choice, given that 60% of the data centers slated for 2027 have not begun construction.