Riot Becomes Anthropic's Sixth Compute Deal, and Nvidia Backs Wall Street

TL;DR

• The AI Compute Deal Ledger added 7 rows this week: $17.4 billion of new binding value and 231 MW of new binding capacity. The running binding total is now $774 billion on 8.90 GW, up from $757 billion and 8.67 GW last week.
• Riot Platforms signed a $9.1 billion, 191 MW, 20-year lease with Anthropic, its sixth distinct compute counterparty in the ledger alongside AWS, Azure, Google, SpaceX and TeraWulf. The stock move is already covered in why RIOT popped and then gave most of it back; this piece is about what the deal does to the dataset.
• Nvidia announced MOUs with six asset managers, Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs and KKR, to mobilize over $500 billion for AI data centers, power and Nvidia hardware. It is logged as a framework, and none of that $500 billion enters the ledger's totals.
• Two older deals surfaced that had never made it into the dataset: Digi Power X's $1.1 billion Cerebras colocation agreement from May, and CoreWeave's $6 billion cloud deal plus $1 billion equity investment from Jane Street, from April.
• IBM and Together AI signed a smaller but genuinely new $240 million multi-year deal for a dedicated Nvidia HGX B300 inference cluster on IBM Cloud, going live Q1 2027.
• Still blocked: Sharon AI's disclosed $8.8 billion of contracts now reconciles once you add a $4.9 billion Nvidia collaboration, but none of its five contracts beyond the one already in the ledger has independent coverage, and a short-seller report specifically challenges the credibility of one of them.

The Board

Riot lands Anthropic. Nvidia backs Wall Street. Two old deals finally show up.

Anthropic's Sixth Named Compute Counterparty

Riot Platforms, a bitcoin miner mid-pivot to data centers, signed Anthropic to a 20-year, 191 MW lease at its Rockdale, Texas campus. Riot's own disclosure didn't name the tenant; Bloomberg did, the day after. $9.1 billion over the base term, up to $16.1 billion if Anthropic exercises both five-year renewal options. Capacity comes online in two phases: 96 MW by December 2027, the rest by June 2028.

That deal already got the full stock-reaction treatment: the after-hours pop, the next-day fade, the earnings context. What belongs here is what it does to the shape of Anthropic's compute sourcing once it's sitting in the same dataset as everything else Anthropic has signed.

Riot is now the sixth distinct provider or hyperscaler carrying an Anthropic row in this ledger. Amazon and Microsoft cover the cloud commitments, over $100 billion and $30 billion respectively. Google supplies TPU capacity. SpaceX rents out Colossus 1 for $45 billion through 2029. TeraWulf leases 401 MW in Kentucky for $19 billion. Riot is the newest and, on a dollars-per-megawatt basis, one of the cheaper ones. None of these six deals were announced as a coordinated strategy. Anthropic just keeps finding capacity wherever it can get it, and the pattern only becomes visible once someone puts every row next to every other row. That's what a ledger is for.

Nvidia's $500 Billion Isn't a Contract

Nvidia said on August 10 that it's partnering with Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs and KKR to set up "AI Compute Infrastructure Financing Platforms," aimed at mobilizing over $500 billion of third-party capital for data centers, power and Nvidia's own hardware, structured off Nvidia's balance sheet. Reporting describes Nvidia guaranteeing the residual value of the GPUs used as collateral.

I logged it the same way the ledger logged the January 2025 Stargate announcement: as a framework, program-envelope basis, excluded from every summed total. No site is named. No capital is actually committed to a specific project yet. It's a structure, not a signed deal, and treating it as $500 billion of new AI spending would be exactly the kind of headline-versus-contract confusion this dataset exists to catch.

Worth separating from a different $500 billion number already sitting in the candidate queue: the reported Nvidia-SK Hynix letter of intent covering data center investment and HBM4 memory supply. Same round figure, unrelated deal.

A smaller, actually-signed deal landed the same week: IBM and Together AI agreed to a $240 million multi-year contract for a dedicated cluster of Nvidia HGX B300 systems on IBM Cloud, built for Together AI's open-source inference business and due online in the first quarter of 2027. No MOU, no framework, a real contract for a fraction of Nvidia's headline number.

Two Deals That Predate This Week

Digi Power X signed Cerebras to a 10-year, $1.1 billion colocation and services agreement for 40 MW at its Columbiana, Alabama campus, back on May 8. Up to $2.5 billion with a seven-year extension. It only surfaced because Digi Power X's Q2 earnings release restated it without new terms, and the ledger's filing watcher flagged that restatement. The deal itself is three months old.

Jane Street and CoreWeave announced two things on the same day in April: a $6 billion commitment for Jane Street to run its machine-learning workloads on CoreWeave's cloud, and a separate $1 billion equity investment, Jane Street buying CoreWeave stock at $109 a share. Both were sitting in a primary SEC exhibit the whole time. Neither had a ledger row until this week, when CoreWeave's Q2 print (backlog up to $104 billion, plus more than $25 billion of unattributed new bookings) sent me back through the filing that backlog figure referenced.

Recognize the pattern from last week's update: a company restates an old number at earnings, the restatement is the only reason anyone looks, and the actual deal turns out to be months old. That's most of how this dataset grows now. Genuinely new announcements are a minority of what gets added in any given week.

What's Still Blocked

Sharon AI's math finally closes, and I'm not sure that's good news. Its five disclosed contracts, the $373 million deal already in the ledger, ESDS ($1.25B), an unnamed AI lab ($1.32B), an unnamed APAC company ($950M), and a six-year Nvidia GB300 collaboration ($4.9B) I hadn't seen before this week, sum to roughly $8.79 billion against the $8.8 billion total contracted revenue the company has claimed. That arithmetic checking out should be reassuring. Instead it just means every piece of the number traces back to Sharon AI itself: no Reuters, Bloomberg, CNBC, WSJ or FT byline on any of the four contracts still sitting outside the ledger. A short-seller report published this week goes further, arguing that ESDS's own disclosed revenue and balance sheet are too small to plausibly support the payment obligation Sharon AI describes. I'm not calling that report right. I'm saying it's independent, adversarial and specific, which none of the coverage on the other side is, and that's reason enough to leave all four contracts where they've been sitting rather than promote any of them on the strength of a filing that just repeats the same numbers.

Core Scientific closed a $444.3 million acquisition of Polaris DS, adding 440 MW of power capacity at its Muskogee, Oklahoma campus. I left it out. This is Core Scientific buying real estate and grid interconnects to lease out later; no AI counterparty is attached to the capacity yet. Same call made on TeraWulf's sale of its Abernathy stake a few weeks ago. If a named tenant signs for that capacity, it gets its own row then.

Three filings this week turned out to be nothing: a $25 billion Alphabet bond and a $2.6 billion CoreWeave loan, both routine debt raises with no specific project named; and a Southport Acquisition Corp II SPAC prospectus that mentions "AI" the way every SPAC prospectus mentions whatever is trending.

The One-Line Read

Of the $17.4 billion added this week, $9.3 billion (Riot, IBM) is actually new news. The rest was signed months ago and simply hadn't been found. Nvidia's $500 billion stays off every total until it's a signed contract with a name attached.

Sources: primary filings and press releases from Riot Platforms, Nvidia, Digi Power X, CoreWeave and Jane Street, cross-checked against Bloomberg, CNBC and trade press where cited above. Every figure links to its row in the full ledger, browsable per company on pages like Riot's entity record, Anthropic's and CoreWeave's.