Bitcoin mining companies quietly became some of the most valuable real estate in AI, and Riot Platforms just proved it again. The company announced a 20-year data center lease worth roughly $9.1 billion in contracted revenue, with Bloomberg reporting the tenant is Anthropic, the company behind Claude. Riot has not officially confirmed the name, but the scale of the deal tells you everything about where AI infrastructure demand is heading.
The agreement covers 191 megawatts of IT capacity at Riot’s Rockdale campus in Texas, running through June 2048. There are also two five-year extension options that could push the total contract value to $16.1 billion. Delivery is phased: the first 96 megawatts are targeted for December 2027, with the full build-out complete by June 2028. To fund the initial development, Riot secured a $573 million interim financing facility from Morgan Stanley while it works on finalizing an investment-grade credit backstop.
This is Riot’s second major AI lease in under seven months. Back in January, the company signed a deal with AMD. CEO Jason Les noted that combined, the two agreements represent 241 megawatts and roughly $9.8 billion in long-term contracted revenue. That’s a meaningful pivot for a company still reporting Bitcoin mining as its largest revenue line. For context, mining brought in $113.7 million last quarter, while data center revenue was just $23.2 million, reflecting only the initial 25-megawatt AMD delivery. The Anthropic deal, once it ramps, would fundamentally reshape that revenue mix.
Why does this matter beyond Riot’s balance sheet? Because Anthropic competing for this kind of capacity puts it squarely in the same infrastructure arms race as OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Meta AI. Training and running frontier models at scale requires enormous, stable power. Companies like Riot, which already hold approved multi-gigawatt power capacity and in-house development expertise, have become critical suppliers to labs that can’t build fast enough on their own. It’s not a coincidence that Riot’s stock surged more than 25% in after-hours trading after the news, even after closing down 5.46% during the regular session.
The Q2 financials released alongside the announcement add some useful texture. Riot posted total revenue of $174.2 million, up 14% year over year, but recorded a net loss of $237.2 million compared to net income of $219.5 million in Q2 2025. The loss reflects the capital-intensive phase of transitioning from a pure mining operation to a data center business. Still, the company ended the quarter with over $1.2 billion in liquid assets, including 11,380 bitcoin and $548.9 million in cash, which gives it room to absorb construction costs while the AI lease revenue comes online.
For developers and founders evaluating the AI infrastructure supply chain, the key takeaway is simple: power capacity is the new GPU. And whoever locked it up early, wins.
