Bitcoin Miner Riot Lands $9.1B, 20-Year AI Compute Deal With Anthropic

Riot Platforms disclosed a 20-year lease of 191 MW of critical IT capacity at its Rockdale, Texas campus — a deal Bloomberg identifies as Anthropic's, worth about $9.1B in base revenue through June 2048, with extension options that could push it to $16.1B. Shares jumped ~25% after hours as crypto miners double down on AI hosting.

Key Takeaways

Riot Platforms disclosed a 20-year lease of 191 MW of critical IT capacity at its Rockdale, Texas campus — a deal Bloomberg identifies as Anthropic's, worth about $9.1B in base revenue through June 2048, with extension options that could push it to $16.1B.
Shares jumped ~25% after hours as crypto miners double down on AI hosting.

AI synthesis4 sources9

Riot Platforms, the bitcoin miner, disclosed on August 11 that it has executed a 20-year data center lease covering 191 megawatts of critical IT capacity at its Rockdale, Texas campus — a contract Bloomberg identifies as Anthropic's. The deal is expected to generate approximately $9.1 billion in base revenue through June 2048, with two five-year extension options that could push the total value as high as $16.1 billion.

The ramp is phased: 96 MW are scheduled to come online by December 2027, with the full 191 MW delivered by June 2028. Morgan Stanley is providing $573 million in interim financing. Markets reacted sharply — Riot shares jumped about 25% in after-hours trading and gained around 20% in pre-market trading the next morning.

The deal is a milestone in the bitcoin mining industry's pivot to AI and high-performance computing. As mining margins compress, operators with large power footprints and industrial campuses are repositioning as data center landlords for AI tenants. Riot's Rockdale facility hosts 700 MW of developed capacity using both immersion and air-cooled systems, making it one of the largest dedicated power sites of its kind in the United States.

For Anthropic, the agreement is another piece of a rapidly expanding compute portfolio that already includes the Theseus Infrastructure venture with Macquarie and GIC, a reported $35 billion loan to lease chips at five data centers, and TPU capacity leased inside Google's cloud. Locking in 191 MW of dedicated capacity at a site with existing grid interconnection is increasingly the scarcest resource in frontier AI.

For Riot, the contract transforms a bitcoin-mining campus into a long-duration, investment-grade revenue stream — and offers a template for other miners weighing AI hosting deals. The transition, analysts note, is not without risk: AI lease economics differ from mining economics, and the sector's track record of converting power capacity into AI revenue is still young.