Riot Platforms (RIOT) signed a $9.1 billion, 20-year deal to supply 191 megawatts of computing capacity to AI firm Anthropic at its Rockdale, Texas campus. Shares jumped roughly 20% in pre-market trading on the news.
The contract, reported by CoinDesk and confirmed in Riot’s Monday press release, is the largest AI-compute agreement struck by a public bitcoin miner to date. Bloomberg identified Anthropic as the counterparty. Riot’s own release described the customer only as “a leading frontier AI lab.”
Two five-year extension options could raise the total contract value to $16.1 billion. The base term alone is projected to generate $7.3 billion to $8.2 billion in cumulative net operating income. Deployment starts December 2027. Full buildout is expected by June 2028.
This follows Riot’s earlier lease with chipmaker AMD. Combined contracted AI capacity at Rockdale now reaches 241 megawatts. The company delivered an initial 25 megawatts during the second quarter and is constructing another 25.
Shares climbed more than 20% in pre-market trading before U.S. markets opened Tuesday, per CoinDesk. Cointelegraph, citing Yahoo Finance data, put the overnight gain above 21%, after a 5.4% decline in Monday’s regular session. The stock is up 53% year-to-date. Riot is the world’s fourth-largest bitcoin mining company by market cap, at $7.33 billion, per CompaniesMarketCap.
The financials behind the pivot tell their own story. Second-quarter revenue rose 14% to $174.2 million, including $23.2 million from data centers. Bitcoin-mining revenue slid to $113.7 million. Riot’s bitcoin treasury fell from 15,680 BTC to 11,380 BTC at quarter-end, a reduction of 4,300 coins over three months, per BitcoinTreasuries.net data cited by CoinDesk.
The Anthropic agreement lands amid a wider pivot into AI and high-performance computing across the mining sector. Anthropic separately signed a six-year, $10 billion contract with Volta Infra for capacity at a Norway site operated by bitcoin miner Bitdeer. A prior Anthropic deal with TeraWulf drew conflicting figures: Cointelegraph reported $19 billion over 20 years, while CoinDesk put it near $18 billion over 18 years.
Rivals that bet earlier on AI infrastructure have not shared Riot’s lift. Cipher Mining (CIFR), TeraWulf (WULF), and IREN (IREN) all sit more than 40% below their record highs despite continued dealmaking.
Bernstein said in a July 23 report that AI-bitcoin miner partnerships are necessary to address the power crunch constraining AI data centers, per Cointelegraph. Cointelegraph said it approached Anthropic and Riot for comment; no response was reported.
The deal terms leave gaps. Whether the $9.1 billion is front-loaded or spread evenly across two decades is not disclosed. The extension options that could push the total to $16.1 billion were reported by Bloomberg and confirmed by CoinDesk, but the mechanics of triggering them are not public.
Holders, as ever, are divided.
