Riot Platforms is now generating higher margins hosting AI compute than mining Bitcoin, after locking in a 20-year, $9.1 billion data center lease that Bloomberg has identified as running to Anthropic. The deal, signed against Riot’s Rockdale, Texas campus, covers 191 megawatts of critical IT capacity and is projected to deliver profit margins roughly three times higher than the company’s core Bitcoin mining business.
Under the lease terms, Riot expects to book between $7.3 billion and $8.2 billion in cumulative net operating income over the contract’s base term, translating to average annual NOI of $365 million to $411 million. The agreement also carries two five-year extension options that could push its total value as high as $16.1 billion if both are exercised, with the lease itself running through June 2048.
A miner turning into a landlord for AI labs
Deployment is set to arrive in two phases: 96 megawatts of capacity is targeted to go live in December 2027, with the remaining 95 megawatts following by June 2028. Riot’s own SEC filing disclosing the agreement described the tenant only as “one of the world’s leading frontier AI labs,” before subsequent reporting confirmed Anthropic as the counterparty. Riot CEO Jason Les called the lease “a defining moment in our evolution into a leading developer of large-scale data centers” in the company’s earnings release.
Related: BlackRock Says Bitcoin's Monetary-Alternative Case Holds After 27% Drop
The broader miner pivot to AI
Riot isn’t alone in redirecting power capacity away from Bitcoin mining and toward AI hosting — a trend accelerating across the sector as compute-hungry AI labs outbid crypto mining economics for the same megawatts. Riot has now signed 241 megawatts of contracted AI and HPC hosting capacity in just over six months, including a separate hosting agreement with AMD, representing roughly $9.8 billion in combined long-term revenue commitments from two of the AI industry’s most prominent players.
What it means for Riot’s Bitcoin exposure
The shift doesn’t mean Riot is exiting Bitcoin mining outright, but it does mark a structural change in how the company allocates its power capacity and capital going forward: megawatts once dedicated to hashing now compete directly against AI leases that, on Riot’s own numbers, pay several times better. To fund the project’s early construction phase, Riot arranged a $573 million interim financing facility through Morgan Stanley while it works toward a permanent credit backstop — a sign of how capital-intensive the AI hosting pivot has become even for an already-established mining operator.
