Bitcoin miner Riot Platforms has signed a 20-year data center lease tied to Anthropic, covering 191 megawatts of critical IT capacity at its Rockdale, Texas campus and carrying total revenue potential of $16.1 billion if extension options are exercised. The agreement is expected to generate roughly $9.1 billion over its initial term alone, with the contract running through June 2048.
Riot plans to bring the capacity online in stages, reaching 96 megawatts by December 2027 and completing the full 191-megawatt buildout by June 2028. To fund early construction, the company arranged a $573 million interim financing facility through Morgan Stanley while it works toward a permanent credit backstop. Riot shares jumped as much as 25% in after-hours trading once the deal's scale became public, part of a Q2 earnings disclosure that also flagged a $237 million GAAP net loss for the quarter.
Diversifying Without Abandoning Bitcoin
The move does not signal Riot walking away from bitcoin mining. Instead, it reflects a broader industry recognition that miners already hold infrastructure — power capacity, cooling systems, substations and site-development expertise — that overlaps directly with what AI companies need to stand up new compute capacity quickly. Combined with an earlier lease to AMD, Riot's own second-quarter disclosure shows the company has now contracted 241 megawatts of critical IT capacity and close to $9.8 billion in long-term signed revenue with two of the largest names in AI infrastructure.
Part of an Industry-Wide Shift
Riot is far from alone in making this pivot. Public miners including Core Scientific, Cipher Mining, TeraWulf, Bitdeer, Iris Energy and Hut 8 have all announced AI or high-performance-computing strategies over the past year. Core Scientific has roughly $10 billion in contracted revenue through its CoreWeave partnership, while Cipher Mining signed a 15-year, 300-megawatt direct lease with Amazon Web Services expected to generate $5.5 billion. Industry estimates suggest listed miners could derive as much as 70% of revenue from AI compute by the end of 2026, up from roughly 30% today, since AI hosting contracts can generate several times the revenue per megawatt that bitcoin mining does.
Related: Bitcoin Holds Near $63,500 as ETF Buying Meets Miner Selling
A More Predictable Revenue Base
Unlike mining revenue, which swings with bitcoin's price, network difficulty and block rewards, long-term compute leases lock in contracted income over many years — a structural change in how the market values these companies. As one analysis of the trend put it, a miner able to serve both the bitcoin network and AI compute demand simultaneously may end up better positioned than one relying on mining alone, even as the $16.1 billion headline figure remains conditional on Riot and Anthropic actually exercising the deal's extension options rather than guaranteed revenue.
