Don’t Look Now, But Anthropic is Bypassing Hyperscalers Srividya Kalyanaraman Tue, August 11, 2026 at 3:39 PM GMT+2 3 min read NVDA RIOT BTC-USD MSFT Don't Look Now, But Anthropic is Bypassing Hyperscalers - Moby THE GIST Our analysts just identified a stock with the potential to be the next Nvidia. Tell us how you invest and we'll show you why it's our #1 pick. 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. Nvidia-level potential. 30M+ investors trust Moby to find it first.
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.
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