Riot Platforms disclosed a 20-year information heart lease settlement on August 10, 2026 Monday with an initially unnamed “main frontier AI” firm, later reported by Bloomberg to be Anthropic, anticipated to generate roughly $9.1 billion in complete contract income.
Contained in the Deal
The settlement covers 191 megawatts of IT capability at Riot’s Rockdale campus in Texas, sufficient to energy roughly 143,000 houses at any given second, and runs via June 2048.
Supply is phased, with the primary 96 megawatts focused for December 2027 and the complete 191 megawatts by June 2028.
The contract contains two five-year extension choices that would elevate its complete potential worth to $16.1 billion.
Riot mentioned it secured a $573 million interim financing facility from Morgan Stanley to cowl preliminary growth prices whereas it finalizes a separate, investment-grade credit score backstop for the buildout.
Riot’s common Monday buying and selling session closed down 5.46%, however shares surged roughly 25% in after-hours buying and selling as soon as the deal’s scale grew to become clear, buying and selling close to $24.30 to $24.40.
Riot declined to touch upon Anthropic particularly because the counterparty, and Anthropic didn’t reply to a request for remark, although Bloomberg’s sourcing on the identification was described as coming from folks conversant in the matter.
Riot itself solely described its counterparty as a “main frontier AI” firm in its personal disclosure, leaving the precise identification to Bloomberg’s separate reporting quite than confirming it instantly.
Riot’s Second Main AI Deal This 12 months
This follows an earlier lease Riot signed with AMD in January 2026.
CEO Jason Les tied the 2 offers collectively instantly within the firm’s earnings assertion. “In simply over six months, Riot has now executed leases totaling 241 megawatts of capability, representing roughly $9.8 billion of long-term, contracted income with two of crucial corporations within the AI ecosystem,” Les mentioned.
He added that Riot differentiates itself via totally accredited, multi-gigawatt-scale energy capability already energized, in-house information heart growth experience, and the flexibility to engineer customized infrastructure for demanding workloads.
Riot started shifting from Bitcoin mining towards AI information facilities in 2025, formally launching a course of to monetize its energy and infrastructure for high-density computing earlier than signing its first main lease with AMD that January.
Notably, this isn’t even the corporate’s first main pivot. Riot initially operated as a maker of diagnostic equipment for the biotech business underneath the title Bioptix earlier than shifting into Bitcoin mining years earlier.
Every pivot has adopted the identical underlying logic, redirecting the corporate’s current belongings, whether or not lab gear, mining rigs, or now information heart capability, towards whichever market presents the strongest returns on the time.
Friends together with Core Scientific, IREN, Utilized Digital, TeraWulf, and Hut 8 are pursuing comparable AI and high-performance computing methods, a development our earlier protection of Bitcoin’s hash fee decline and the AI mining pivot explores in additional depth throughout the broader mining business.
Anthropic’s Broader Capability Push
The deal matches right into a wider sample of Anthropic securing computing capability throughout a number of suppliers to maintain tempo with buyer demand.
The corporate already depends closely on Amazon Net Providers (AWS), Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and CoreWeave, and has individually signed a $10 billion take care of the infrastructure startup Volta Infra and agreed to purchase almost $45 billion in computing from Elon Musk’s xAI in Could.
For comparability, rival OpenAI’s prime cloud distributors are Microsoft Azure, Oracle Cloud, AWS, CoreWeave, and Google Cloud, an identical however not equivalent combine.
Riot’s Second-Quarter Outcomes
The deal was introduced alongside Riot’s second-quarter earnings, which confirmed combined outcomes.
Complete income rose 14% to $174.2 million from $153 million a 12 months earlier, with information heart income contributing $23.2 million, reflecting the completion of the preliminary 25 megawatts delivered to AMD.
Bitcoin mining income got here in at $113.7 million and engineering income rose to $37.3 million. The corporate produced 1,587 BTC in the course of the quarter and ended the interval holding greater than $1.2 billion in liquid belongings, together with 11,380 BTC and $548.9 million in money.
Riot posted a web lack of $237.2 million, or $0.68 per diluted share, in contrast with web earnings of roughly $219.4 million, or $0.58 per share, in the identical quarter final 12 months.
What Comes Subsequent
Retail sentiment shifted to bullish following the information, with RIOT fill up 53% year-to-date as of its final shut.
What this implies for you: Riot’s steadiness sheet nonetheless exhibits significant Bitcoin publicity whilst its income combine shifts towards AI internet hosting, so the inventory more and more features as a hybrid wager on each Bitcoin’s worth and the sturdiness of long-term AI infrastructure contracts, a mix price understanding clearly earlier than treating RIOT as a pure proxy for both market by itself.