Riot Platforms, one of the largest publicly traded Bitcoin miners, has signed a 20-year deal to supply 191 megawatts of computing capacity to Anthropic from its Rockdale, Texas campus, a lease worth an estimated $9.1 billion in total contract revenue. Riot shares surged as much as 25% in after-hours trading on the news, one of the clearest signals yet that Bitcoin miners' pivot into AI infrastructure is becoming a core part of their business rather than a side experiment.
According to Riot's own disclosure, the lease runs through June 2048 and carries two optional five-year extensions that could push total contract value to roughly $16.1 billion if fully exercised. Riot expects to deliver the first 96 MW of capacity by December 2027, with the full 191 MW online by June 2028, and the company has lined up a $573 million interim financing facility from Morgan Stanley to help fund the buildout. The company is projecting average annual net operating income of $365-411 million from the agreement once fully ramped.
Riot's second major AI tenant at Rockdale
The Anthropic lease is not Riot's first move into AI hosting. The company signed an initial 50 MW deal with AMD at the same Rockdale site in January, with 25 MW already delivered on time and on budget and further phases scheduled through mid-2027. Combined, the AMD and Anthropic leases now represent 241 MW of contracted capacity and roughly $9.8 billion in long-term revenue at a single site — a scale that begins to rival the miner's core Bitcoin hashrate business as a revenue driver.
Related: MARA Sold $1.63B of Bitcoin in H1 2026 to Fund AI Pivot
Part of a broader miner-to-AI shift
Riot's move mirrors a pattern playing out across the Bitcoin mining sector, where operators sitting on cheap power contracts and large real-estate footprints have found it more profitable to lease capacity to AI labs than to mine Bitcoin directly at current difficulty levels. That shift is also being financed at massive scale: Wall Street has been arranging hundreds of billions of dollars in financing to support the broader AI data center buildout, and deals like Riot's suggest miners are positioning to capture a growing share of that capital rather than compete purely on Bitcoin's block reward.
