Riot Platforms Stock Jumps 25% on Reported $9 Billion AI Compute Deal With Anthropic
Riot Platforms disclosed a 20-year, roughly $9.1 billion lease for 191 megawatts at its Rockdale, Texas campus, with Bloomberg naming Anthropic as the counterparty.
Riot Platforms shares climbed 25% in after-hours trading after the bitcoin miner disclosed a 20-year data center lease valued at roughly $9.1 billion. Bloomberg reported the counterparty is AI firm Anthropic.
The agreement covers 191 megawatts of IT capacity at Riot’s Rockdale, Texas campus and runs through June 2048, the company said Monday. Two five-year extension options could lift the total contract value to $16.1 billion. Delivery comes in phases. Riot targets 96 megawatts online by December 2027 and the full 191 megawatts by June 2028.
Riot did not name the counterparty in its statement. Bloomberg identified it as Anthropic, the maker of the Claude chatbot. The Block said it reached out to Riot to confirm. Cointelegraph said it approached both Anthropic and Riot for comment.
Riot’s Nasdaq-listed stock (RIOT) closed down 5.46% in the regular session before snapping 25.26% higher after-hours to $24.3, per The Block. Cointelegraph, citing the same move, put the overnight gain at more than 21%. The stock is up 53% year-to-date, according to Yahoo Finance data cited by Cointelegraph.
The deal in numbers
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| Base contract value | $9.1 billion |
| Value with extensions | $16.1 billion |
| IT capacity | 191 megawatts |
| Term | through June 2048 |
| First-phase delivery | 96 MW by Dec 2027 |
| Full delivery | 191 MW by June 2028 |
| Interim financing | $573 million (Morgan Stanley) |
To cover initial development costs, Riot secured a $573 million interim financing facility from Morgan Stanley while it finalizes an investment-grade credit backstop. The terms of that backstop were not disclosed.
CEO Jason Les framed the lease as part of a broader pivot. “In just over six months, Riot has now executed leases totaling 241 megawatts of capacity, representing approximately $9.8 billion of long-term, contracted revenue with two of the most important companies in the AI ecosystem,” he said Monday. The other lease is a January agreement with Advanced Micro Devices (AMD). The specific megawatt split between the two was not broken out.
The headline $9.8 billion covers both contracts combined. Strip out the AMD piece and the Anthropic-adjacent lease is the larger single bet. Riot’s own filing rounds the base value to $9.1 billion while Bloomberg and Cointelegraph cite “about $9 billion.” Figures differ by roughly $100 million.
Quarter results landed the same day
Riot reported second-quarter results alongside the lease disclosure. Total revenue reached $174.2 million in the three months ended June 30, up 14% from $153 million a year earlier. Data center revenue was $23.2 million. Bitcoin mining revenue came in at $113.7 million and engineering revenue at $37.3 million. The company produced 1,587 bitcoin in the quarter.
It was a loss-making quarter on net. Riot posted a net loss of $237.2 million, or $0.68 per diluted share, versus net income of $219.5 million in the prior-year period. Liquid assets stood above $1.2 billion, including 11,380 bitcoin and $548.9 million in cash.
A net loss widening by $456 million against a 14% revenue gain is not what the after-hours tape is pricing. What it is pricing is the contracted revenue line. That is $9.1 billion locked in over 20 years, with a pathway to $16.1 billion if both extension options are exercised.
Miners chasing AI demand
The deal is the latest and largest sign of bitcoin miners repurposing power and land for AI compute rather than mining. On July 6, Anthropic struck a $19 billion 20-year data center lease with bitcoin miner TeraWulf, Cointelegraph reported. Bernstein, in a July 23 research note shared with Cointelegraph, called AI-miner partnerships “necessary” to address the power crunch constraining new AI data centers.
Other miners pushing into AI and high-performance compute include Bitdeer, CleanSpark, MARA Holdings, Core Scientific, Hut 8, and IREN. Riot is the world’s fourth-largest bitcoin miner by market capitalization at $7.33 billion, per CompaniesMarketCap data cited by Cointelegraph.
What remains unknown is whether Anthropic will use the Rockdale capacity for model training or inference. Riot did not specify, and Anthropic has not commented. The final terms of the investment-grade credit backstop are also undisclosed. What the after-hours move confirms is the market’s read: a mining company with power contracts and energized land just sold 20 years of them to an AI lab.
