BitcoinAug 11, 2026

Riot Platforms Locks In $9.1B AI Deal With Anthropic, Shares Spike 25%

Riot will lease 191MW at its Rockdale, Texas site to Anthropic for 20 years; extensions could push the deal to $16.1B.

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Riot Platforms Locks In $9.1B AI Deal With Anthropic, Shares Spike 25%

Riot Platforms said it has signed a 20-year agreement to supply 191 megawatts of capacity from its Rockdale, Texas campus to a “leading frontier AI” company, a contract the miner expects to generate about $9.1 billion in revenue. Bloomberg reported the customer is Anthropic, and the deal carries two five-year extension options that could push its total value as high as $16.1 billion.

Riot’s stock initially fell 5.4% on Monday before surging in after-hours trading — up more than 21% by Cointelegraph’s count and as much as 25% according to The Block. The move extends a run that has already lifted Riot shares over 53% year-to-date. The company’s market capitalization stood at roughly $7.33 billion, ranking it the world’s fourth-largest Bitcoin mining company by that measure.

The numbers behind the power deal

Rockdale has 700 megawatts of grid interconnection capacity in total, meaning the Anthropic lease would consume roughly 27% of the site’s approved power once online. Riot’s broader portfolio spans about 1.7 gigawatts of fully approved capacity across its facilities, giving it substantial room to layer in additional AI or high-performance-computing tenants beyond this contract.

The Anthropic agreement builds on Riot’s existing data-center relationship with Advanced Micro Devices, which began with a 25-megawatt lease at Rockdale before AMD exercised an option to double its footprint to 50 megawatts. That business remains small next to the new deal for now: Riot reported just $33.2 million in data-center revenue for the first quarter.

Anthropic’s second multibillion-dollar miner deal

This is not Anthropic’s first foray into Bitcoin-mining infrastructure. On July 6, the AI company signed a $19 billion, 20-year data-center lease with miner TeraWulf. Combined with the Riot agreement, Anthropic has now committed roughly $28 billion in long-term compute leases to former Bitcoin-mining sites in under six weeks.

The pattern reflects a broader shift already underway across the mining sector. Bitdeer, CleanSpark, MARA Holdings, Core Scientific, Hut 8 and IREN have all been pursuing AI and HPC partnerships as electricity-hungry AI models collide with a shortage of grid-connected power. Bernstein analysts noted in a July 23 report that tie-ups between AI firms and Bitcoin miners are becoming necessary to relieve the power crunch constraining new AI data centers.

Why it matters for miner investors

For Riot shareholders, the deal reframes the stock’s value proposition: a company once valued almost purely on its Bitcoin hash rate and treasury is now pricing in a multibillion-dollar, two-decade AI revenue stream that dwarfs its current mining economics. Riot has also been steadily selling BTC from its holdings even as it builds out this compute business, underscoring the diversification push.

Bitcoin itself traded near $64,060 at the time of the announcement, up 1.82% on the day — a reminder that the miner’s equity move was driven by its AI contract rather than BTC price action. As more mining companies convert spare megawatts into AI leases, investors will likely keep watching how much of each miner’s revenue and stock valuation shifts away from block rewards and toward long-term compute contracts.