Riot Platforms has signed a 20-year data center lease with Anthropic worth roughly $9.1 billion, becoming the second major bitcoin miner in as many months to trade rig floor space for AI compute racks. The agreement, disclosed in an 8-K filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on August 10, sent Riot shares up more than 25% in after-hours trading, from roughly $19 to $24.30.
Under the deal, Riot will build a Tier 3 data center at its Rockdale, Texas campus to house 191 megawatts of IT capacity for Anthropic. The first 96 megawatts are due online by December 2027, with the remaining capacity following by mid-2028. An optional five-year extension through 2053 could push total contract value above $16 billion. Morgan Stanley is fronting $573 million in interim financing to cover early construction costs.
A second miner makes the same pivot
Riot's move mirrors a deal struck barely a month earlier by fellow bitcoin miner TeraWulf, which signed its own 20-year, roughly $19 billion lease with Anthropic covering 401 megawatts at a Hawesville, Kentucky site. Together the two agreements underscore how directly Anthropic is now competing for the power-dense infrastructure that miners spent the last several years building for hashing, not inference — and how much more that capacity is worth to an AI lab than it was to a mining pool.
The Anthropic contract is Riot's second major data center agreement of 2026, following an earlier arrangement with Advanced Micro Devices, and lifts the company's long-term contracted revenue to $9.8 billion.
Bitcoin exposure, cushioned
The timing matters because Riot's core mining business has been under pressure. The company's second-quarter results showed an adjusted loss per share of $0.33, wider than the $0.23 loss analysts had forecast, with a GAAP net loss of $237 million driven largely by non-cash charges tied to its bitcoin holdings and depreciation. As a large holder and periodic seller of mined BTC, Riot's treasury decisions carry some weight in spot markets during weak stretches for the coin.
With $9.1 billion in contracted, non-bitcoin revenue now on the books, analysts cited by AMBCrypto suggested Riot is less likely to lean on BTC sales to fund operations during downturns — a small but real reduction in one source of miner-driven sell pressure at a time when bitcoin has been trading choppily below its cycle highs. The broader signal is that the biggest public miners are increasingly hedging their bitcoin-price exposure with fixed, dollar-denominated AI contracts rather than relying solely on block rewards and transaction fees.
Related: Empery Digital's Unrestricted Bitcoin Buffer Shrinks to Just 325 BTC
For Riot, the Anthropic lease doesn't replace mining — the company says it remains committed to its hash rate growth plans — but it does give the balance sheet a second engine that runs independently of bitcoin's price.
