Riot Platforms shares jumped 5% to reclaim the $20 level this week, extending a rally that began after the Bitcoin miner disclosed a $9.1 billion, 20-year data center lease with an AI lab later reported to be Anthropic. Morgan Stanley has since set a price target of $43 on the stock, more than double where it traded before the announcement.
Riot's own 8-K filing with the SEC confirms the agreement covers 191 megawatts of critical IT capacity at the company's Rockdale, Texas campus, running through June 2048. Two five-year extension options could push the total contract value to roughly $16.1 billion. Capacity will come online in stages, with 96 megawatts expected by December 2027 and the full 191 megawatts complete by June 2028.
From Bitcoin Miner to Data Center Developer
The lease is Riot's second major data center agreement at Rockdale, following a deal with Advanced Micro Devices disclosed in January. Together, the two contracts give Riot roughly 241 megawatts of contracted capacity and close to $9.8 billion in long-term contracted revenue, cementing a pivot that has been building for months: using the power infrastructure built for Bitcoin mining to instead host the compute-hungry hardware AI labs need.
Related: Kraken's Parent Payward Joins Anthropic's AI Security Program
That shift mirrors a wider trend among Bitcoin mining operators weighing whether their power contracts and real estate are worth more leased to AI companies than dedicated to mining rigs. Miners including IREN, Applied Digital and TeraWulf have made similar moves, and shares across the group climbed alongside Riot's on the news, suggesting investors are increasingly pricing miners on their data center optionality rather than Bitcoin exposure alone.
A Pattern for Anthropic, Too
For Anthropic, the Riot lease is its third major compute procurement in roughly three months, part of a buildout that now totals more than $60 billion in commitments as the company races to secure long-term computing capacity against rivals including OpenAI and Google. The deal underscores how thoroughly AI infrastructure demand is reshaping capital flows into the crypto mining sector — turning what was once purely a Bitcoin-price bet into a leveraged play on AI data center economics as well.
