Riot Platforms Strikes $9.1 Billion AI Infrastructure Deal with Anthropic as Bitcoin Miners Pivot

Riot Platforms strikes deal with Anthropic as bitcoin miners shift focus to AI infrastructure

Bitcoin miner Riot Platform has struck a $9 billion, 20-year compute deal with Anthropic, CNBC's David Faber has confirmed. The agreement would lease 191 megawatts at Riot's Rockdale, Texas computer campus, giving Anthropic access to scarce, grid-connected power as demand surges for computing power that can be used to provide artificial intelligence - and transitioning Riot from bitcoin miner to AI infrastructure landlord. Shares initially soared more than 20% in reaction before giving up almost the entire gain. The agreement is expected to generate $9.1 billion in revenue over its 20-year term, rising to roughly $16.1 billion if the agreement is extended for two additional five-year periods. It follows Riot's existing agreement with Advanced Micro Devices, meaning Riot now has a "two-tenant campus carrying $9.8 [billion] of contracted data center revenue," Compass Point analyst Michael Donovan said in a note Tuesday. Bitcoin mining stocks once looked like a way to gain leveraged exposure to the price of bitcoin. But with the growth of AI, and against the backdrop of a prolonged slump in cryptocurrency prices, most publicly traded bitcoin miners are increasingly valued by investors as owners of digital infrastructure rather than producers of bitcoin, given their power capacity, data center assets and energy contracts. The bitcoin miner-to-AI pivot began taking shape the last time crypto prices tumbled, in 2022, though usually among smaller companies that are more likely to be under water when the bitcoin price is in a sustained pullback -- meaning the price of bitcoin has fallen below the cost of mining it, including electricity, hardware and operating expenses. With lower prices, more competition and the reduction in mining incentives driven by the quadrennial Bitcoin halving, mining companies see their profits squeezed until they finally operate at a loss. Bitcoin-miners-turned-AI-infrastructure providers offer investors exposure to AI demand without requiring a bet on which model or application ultimately wins -- because the AI companies all require the same increasingly scarce power, compute capacity and physical facilities. Cipher Mining, Hut 8 and Terawulf are among what has become known as the hybrid bitcoin miners. Riot, along with Mara Holdings and CleanSpark, have largely remained the pure-play miners of the sector. That scarcity could become even more valuable as the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, known as ERCOT, scrutinizes new power projects, according to Donovan, the Compass Point analyst. "ERCOT's increased scrutiny may slow speculative projects still navigating the queue, but it does not reduce tenant demand for large blocks of near-term power," he said. "If anything, the scarcity of greenlit capacity should increase its strategic value. Therefore, we reiterate our Buy rating and maintain our $29 price target" on Riot shares, he wrote.

Anthropic signs a $9.1bn, 20-year cloud deal with bitcoin miner Riot Platforms

The Claude maker has signed a twenty-year, $9.1 billion cloud deal with Riot Platforms, a Texas bitcoin miner busily recasting itself as a landlord for artificial intelligence. Anthropic has struck another enormous deal to feed its appetite for computing power, and this time the counterparty is a company that until recently made its money digging up bitcoin. The twenty-year arrangement is worth $9.1 billion and gives the Claude maker a large slab of capacity at a Texas campus that Riot Platforms is busily converting from crypto mining into rented compute for AI, the latest in a run of vast infrastructure agreements the lab has signed to secure the hardware its models demand. The contract runs through June 2048 and carries two five-year extension options, so if both are taken up the headline value climbs to $16.1 billion, which makes this less a lease than a multi-decade marriage between a frontier AI lab and a former miner. What Anthropic gets for the money is 191 megawatts of IT capacity at Riot's Rockdale campus, delivered in stages rather than all at once. Riot expects to bring 96MW online by December 2027 and the full 191MW by June 2028, a timeline that quietly assumes the ferocious pace of data-centre construction across Texas holds up. To get there, Riot is leaning on Wall Street. Morgan Stanley is providing $573 million in interim financing to cover the development costs of building the site out, the sort of upfront borrowing that has become routine now that AI's power demands are outrunning the cash on hand of the firms racing to meet them. Investors, for their part, liked what they saw. Riot's shares jumped roughly 25% in after-hours trading on 10 August, touching around $24.30, a reaction that says as much about the market's enthusiasm for anything tethered to AI as it does about the particulars of the contract. A guaranteed twenty-year stream of payments from a well-capitalised customer is, after all, a rather steadier proposition than the price of bitcoin. The company doing the leasing is an unlikely candidate for the role. Riot Platforms is a bitcoin miner by heritage, and a productive one, having mined 1,587 bitcoin in the second quarter of 2026 alone, yet it is now recasting itself as a property manager for compute. Chief executive Jason Les said the firm had "executed leases totaling 241 megawatts of capacity, representing approximately $9.8 billion of long-term, contracted revenue" with major AI players in the space of six months. That pivot is not unique to Riot. A clutch of former bitcoin miners have worked out that the sprawling, power-hungry sites they built to hash blocks are almost perfectly suited to training and running AI models, so they have hurried to re-let that capacity to whoever will pay for it. Anthropic, for its part, has grown used to letting other people build the data centres it then fills with its own workloads. For the Claude maker the logic is straightforward, if faintly dizzying. Anthropic has been signing compute deals at a pace that would have looked absurd a couple of years ago, striking multi-billion-dollar arrangements with cloud providers, chipmakers and now crypto miners, all in an effort to lock down capacity before its rivals do. Demand for its models keeps climbing, and the only way to serve it is to keep buying, leasing, and reserving silicon wherever it can be found, even in the repurposed sheds of a crypto business. There is a neat irony in the whole thing. The energy that once went into conjuring digital coins is being redirected into conjuring digital intelligence, and the same warehouses full of humming machines now answer to a different master. Whether the economics of these twenty-year bets still look clever in 2048, when the current wave of enthusiasm is a distant memory, is a question none of the people signing the cheques seems in any hurry to answer.

Anthropic signs $9.1 billion data center deal with Riot Platforms

Anthropic has struck a $9.1 billion agreement with Riot Platforms, a bitcoin mining company that has been building out AI data center capacity, according to Bloomberg. Riot disclosed the deal on Monday, describing the counterparty only as a "leading frontier AI lab." Riot's Rockdale, Texas, campus will supply 191 megawatts of IT capacity under the terms of the 20-year lease, which extends through June 2048, the company said. Two five-year extension options could raise the total contract value to $16.1 billion. Riot plans to bring capacity online in stages, reaching 96 megawatts by December 2027 and completing the full 191-megawatt buildout by June 2028, the company said. To fund the project's early construction phase, Riot arranged a $573 million interim financing facility through Morgan Stanley $MS as it works toward putting a permanent credit backstop in place. Riot CEO Jason Les said in a statement that the two agreements together bring the company's total signed capacity to 241 megawatts and roughly $9.8 billion in long-term contracted revenue, all accumulated within six months. The earlier deal was with Advanced Micro Devices. Riot stock closed down 5.46% on Monday before the deal was announced, then surged more than 25% in after-hours trading. The Anthropic deal was announced alongside Riot's second-quarter financial results, which showed revenue growth alongside a wider net loss. Total revenue for the three months ended June 30 came in at $174.2 million, up 14% from $153 million a year earlier. Bitcoin mining contributed $113.7 million, while data center revenue was $23.2 million. That compares with net income of $219.5 million, or $0.58 per share, in the year-ago quarter; this quarter Riot swung to a net loss of $237.2 million, or $0.68 per diluted share. Anthropic has been pursuing a series of large computing agreements as demand for its products grows. The company signed a $10 billion, six-year deal with Volta Infra Holdings, a months-old AI infrastructure startup backed by Nvidia $NVDA, to use capacity at a data center in Norway. Anthropic also agreed to buy nearly $45 billion worth of computing from Elon Musk's xAI in May, according to Bloomberg. Earlier arrangements have included deals with SpaceX, AMD $AMD, and Akamai $AKAM Technologies. Riot's path to data centers is an unlikely one: the company spent years in biotech diagnostics under the Bioptix name before reinventing itself as a bitcoin miner, and it is now part of a broader wave of crypto companies chasing AI infrastructure revenue.

Anthropic Strikes $9B Compute Deal with Bitcoin Miner Riot

Anthropic reportedly struck a $9 billion deal with Riot for 191 megawatts of capacity from the Bitcoin miner's Rockdale campus in Texas. Bitcoin miner Riot Platforms said it secured a 20-year agreement to supply 191 megawatts of capacity from its Rockdale, Texas, campus to a "leading frontier AI" company, according to a Monday press release. The customer is Anthropic and the deal is valued at about $9 billion, Bloomberg reported Monday, citing people familiar with the matter. Cointelegraph has approached Anthropic and Riot for comment. Anthropic also struck a $19 billion deal for a 20-year data center lease with Bitcoin miner TeraWulf on July 6. The reported agreement would add Riot to a growing list of Bitcoin miners expanding into AI and high-performance computing, including Bitdeer, CleanSpark, MARA Holdings, Core Scientific, Hut 8 and IREN. Riot's shares fell 5.4% on Monday but rose more than 21% in overnight trading. The stock is up more than 53% year-to-date, according to Yahoo Finance data. Riot ranks as the world's fourth-largest Bitcoin mining company with a $7.33 billion market capitalization, according to CompaniesMarketCap data. Bernstein said in a July 23 report shared with Cointelegraph that partnerships between AI companies and Bitcoin miners are necessary to address the power crunch constraining AI data centers.

Bitcoin Miners Have Something Anthropic Desperately Needs. It's Worth $9.1 Billion

Anthropic has signed a $9.1 billion, 20-year data center lease with Riot Platforms, making the Bitcoin miner at least the third crypto-mining company the Claude maker has tapped for a major AI-infrastructure build. A source familiar with the matter confirmed to Inc. that Anthropic is the unnamed "leading frontier AI lab" leasing 191 megawatts at Riot's Rockdale, Texas, campus. The first 96 MW is due online in December 2027, with the full facility expected by June 2028. Two five-year extensions could push the contract's value to $16.1 billion. Riot shares jumped as much as 23 percent Tuesday before giving back most of the gain. Riot announced the lease alongside its second-quarter earnings. For Riot, the deal is big enough to rival its Bitcoin business. The $9.1 billion initial contract works out to roughly $455 million a year on a simple average. Riot generated $113.7 million from Bitcoin mining last quarter -- or about $455 million annualized. The lease ramps over time, making the comparison imperfect, but it shows the scale of the pivot. CEO Jason Les called the agreement a "defining moment" in its evolution into a large-scale data center developer. Anthropic co-founder and CEO Dario Amodei has been clear about why the company needs so much infrastructure. By May, Anthropic's run-rate revenue had crossed $47 billion, up from roughly $9 billion at the end of 2025. A month earlier, Anthropic committed more than $100 billion over 10 years to Amazon Web Services for up to five gigawatts of compute. "We need to build the infrastructure to keep pace with rapidly growing demand," Amodei said at the time. Miners have the power Increasingly, Anthropic is finding that infrastructure at companies rooted in Bitcoin mining.

Riot Platforms Signs $9 Billion AI Deal With Anthropic

* Deal could generate up to $16.1 billion with extensions * Riot's AI operations at Rockdale will reach 241 megawatts * Company has reduced its Bitcoin treasury by 4,300 BTC In a press release issued Monday, Bitcoin mining firm Riot Platforms announced that it entered into a 20-year agreement to provide 191 megawatts of electricity from its Rockdale, Texas, facility to a leading frontier AI firm, Anthropic. The deal has an estimated value of $9 billion (roughly Rs. 85,806 crore), according to Bloomberg reports on Monday from sources close to the deal. The transaction would see Riot join the likes of Bitdeer, CleanSpark, MARA Holdings, Core Scientific, Hut 8 and IREN in the space of Bitcoin mining firms venturing into AI and high-performance computing. Bitcoin Miners Turn to AI as Long-Term Power Deals Offer Stable Revenue As per the report, Riot, which was once dedicated to mining Bitcoin, serves as an example of how the entire industry has switched its focus to AI hardware, with long-term leases bringing more stable income to companies than block approvals in Bitcoin do. The miners have access to large-scale facilities with preexisting grid connections, land, and cooling facilities, enabling them to deliver their services to hungry-for-power AI companies more quickly than those who have started building their facilities from scratch. Anthropic also just struck a deal worth $10 billion (roughly Rs. 95,340 crore) over six years with Volta Infra, using Bitdeer's bitcoin-mining facility in Norway. The rollout of the Riot sites is set for December 2027, and the complete build-out will be completed by June 2028. Two potential five-year extensions will boost total revenues to $16.1 billion (roughly Rs. 1,53,497 crore). The total net operating income over the base term is expected to range between $7.3 billion (roughly Rs. 69,598 crore) and $8.2 billion (roughly Rs. 78,179 crore). The deal comes after Riot rents chip-maker Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD), with total contracted power for AI operations at Rockdale now standing at 241 megawatts. Riot initially supplied 25 megawatts in the second quarter and is building another 25 megawatts. The shares of Riot came down by 5.4 percent last Monday but have gained more than 21 percent after this announcement. Year to date, the stock has risen by more than 53 percent, says Yahoo Finance data. Riot is also the fourth-largest Bitcoin miner globally with a market cap of $7.3 billion (roughly Rs. 69,598 crore), according to CompaniesMarketCap data. The company is also financing its data center investment through the monthly sale of Bitcoin mining and decreasing its treasury. Riot's total treasury has decreased from 15,680 BTC to 11,380 BTC at the end of the quarter, a decrease of 4,300 BTC. Last week, a report by Cointelegraph released a statement by Bernstein that said it still leans towards the Bitcoin mining industry because of the increasing partnerships between Bitcoin mining firms, which are essential to solve the power limitations of artificial intelligence (AI) data centers. According to the investment manager's Bitcoin mining industry deal tracker, there was one AI-related deal every week in July, with the total number of deals reaching more than 7.5 gigawatts or the contractual value of $150 billion (roughly Rs. 14,30,100 crore) worth of multiyear contracts.

This Bitcoin Miner-Turned-Data Center Operator's Stock is Jumping on a $9B Deal With Anthropic

Get personalized, AI-powered answers built on 27+ years of trusted expertise. Riot Platforms shares are surging on a deal with a big name in AI. Shares of Riot Platforms (RIOT) were up about 4.5% in recent trading, a day after the company secured a $9.1 billion, 20-year deal to supply 191 megawatts of computing power to "one of the world's leading frontier AI labs." Bloomberg reported late last night that the lab is Anthropic, citing people familiar with the deal. The compute will come from Riot's Rockdale, Texas facility, and be brought online in phases through June 2028. The Anthropic deal is Riot's second data center agreement, after the company also signed a deal to provide Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) with between 25 and 200 megawatts of "critical IT load capacity" back in January. Riot, one of several cryptocurrency mining companies pivoting to cloud computing to capitalize on growing AI demand, topped analysts' estimates with $174.24 million in second-quarter revenue, more than $20 million of which came from its new data center business. Riot recorded a net loss of $237.17 million, nearly double the loss analysts had forecast. Anthropic and Riot did not respond to requests for comment on the report in time for publication. With Tuesday's rally, Riot shares have gained roughly 60% since the start of the year.

Anthropic Pays 33% Above Market for AI Capacity - Riot Platforms (NASDAQ:RIOT)

The AI race may be driving a new pricing benchmark. JPMorgan estimates Anthropic agreed to pay roughly $2.4 per watt per year for capacity at Riot Platforms, Inc's (NASDAQ:RIOT) Texas data center -- about 33% above the firm's estimated industry average of $1.8 per watt per year -- suggesting that ready-to-deploy AI infrastructure is commanding a growing premium as demand outpaces supply. Anthropic's Lease Suggests AI Infrastructure Pricing Power Is Strengthening The pricing insight comes from JPMorgan's analysis of Riot's newly signed 191-megawatt data center lease with Anthropic. According to the bank, the contract's implied pricing sits well above prevailing market levels, reinforcing the view that companies building frontier AI models are willing to pay up for capacity which can be delivered quickly. * Riot Platforms shares are climbing with conviction. What's fueling RIOT momentum? The economics are significant. The base 20-year agreement is expected to generate approximately $9.1 billion in total contract value, with two optional five-year extensions increasing the potential value to $16.1 billion. Riot plans to deliver the first 96 MW of capacity by December 2027 and the remaining 95 MW by June 2028. JPMorgan Sees Scarce Power Driving Premium Pricing JPMorgan believes the premium reflects more than Anthropic's willingness to spend. The bank pointed to tightening supply-demand dynamics for AI infrastructure, particularly sites with existing grid access and near-term delivery timelines. Riot's Corsicana campus, which already has approved interconnection capacity and is partially energized, is also under a non-binding letter of intent covering its full 756 MW, underscoring continued demand for large-scale AI deployments. The analysts also argued that recent actions by Texas regulators could further increase the value of power-ready campuses by making existing capacity more difficult to replicate. That, in turn, could support elevated pricing for operators with shovel-ready infrastructure. What Investors Should Watch Next The key question is whether Anthropic's pricing proves to be an outlier or the beginning of a broader repricing across the AI infrastructure market. Trading Ideas David Tepper's Latest AI Bet Is CoreWeave Billionaire investor David Tepper initiated a new CoreWeave stake in Q2 while adding to Nvidia, Amazon and TSMC. 4 min read Read this article If Riot secures a binding lease for its 756 MW Corsicana campus at comparable economics, it would strengthen the argument that power -- not GPUs -- is becoming the scarcest asset in the AI buildout. Latest Private Market Opportunities Join 400,000+ Investors For investors, future lease pricing may matter just as much as megawatts contracted. Markets OpenAI and Anthropic May Be Cheaper Than Chinese AI After All An AlphaSense study finds OpenAI and Anthropic models can cost less than cheaper Chinese AI rivals by completing complex tasks more efficiently. 3 min read Read this article Imagen creada con Inteligencia Artificial Market News and Data brought to you by Benzinga APIs To add Benzinga News as your preferred source on Google, click here.

A $9.1 billion AI deal just changed Riot Platforms' story

Riot Platforms (RIOT) has built its company for years around one exceedingly volatile asset: Bitcoin. Artificial intelligence may be offering it a completely unique future. Riot has signed a deal with Anthropic, the company behind Claude, to offer 191 megawatts of data-center capacity at its Rockdale, Texas, site, Barron's reported, in a deal worth about $9.1 billion for 20 years. There's a major caveat, however. Riot is not getting $9.1 billion up front, Bloomberg noted. That sum is estimated revenue over 20 years. The overall deal's worth may reach approximately $16.1 billion with two possible five-year extensions. Riot entered the announcement with a market worth of about $7.3 billion, according to Business Insider, suggesting the headline value of the original deal exceeds the company's pre-deal equity value. Riot made a total revenue of $647.4 million in 2025. Shares rose after the announcement as investors reevaluated what Riot's infrastructure was really worth. But the main story isn't that Riot discovered a major new customer. It's that the infrastructure built for Bitcoin mining, land, power hookups, and massive computing facilities has suddenly become appealing to an AI sector that's desperate for electricity. The buildout may have been Bitcoin-funded. I suspect AI will eventually determine what is valuable. Riot Platforms is turning Bitcoin infrastructure into AI infrastructure The Anthropic deal is for 191 megawatts of computing capacity at Riot's location in Rockdale. That's important, since electricity is becoming one of the main bottlenecks to artificial intelligence growth. AI companies can buy those advanced chips, but they need a place to run. You need land, you need transmission capacity, you need cooling, you need networking, and you need tremendous amounts of reliable power to do hyperscale computing. Riot already has a lot of the hard part. Its Rockdale facility has about 700 megawatts of developed capacity spread across 200 acres or so, while its Corsicana, Texas, location has access to about 1 gigawatt. Riot says it has almost 2 gigawatts of completely certified power in its portfolio. These assets were worth something at first, because Bitcoin mining requires a lot of electricity. Now they intersect with what the AI businesses need. This might be a significant shift in Riot's business model. Bitcoin mining revenue is a function of token values, difficulty of mining, and energy prices. Long-term data-center contracts can offer a considerably more reliable revenue source. But the possibility isn't as simple as integrating AI computers into an old mining operation. High-performance AI data centers demand considerable additional infrastructure, including improved cooling, networking, redundancy, and extremely high uptime standards. Riot will have to spend a lot and execute effectively to turn electrical power into commercial computer capacity. And that difference counts. Power gives the opportunity, but the economics are execution-driven. AMD gave Riot its first proof of concept Anthropic isn't Riot's first large customer of AI infrastructure. The corporation had already inked a data-center contract with Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) for 25 megawatts of key IT capacity at Rockdale, Barron's confirmed. AMD later exercised an option for an additional 25 megawatts, doubling its contracted footprint to 50 megawatts. Riot also claimed $33.2 million of data-center revenue in the first quarter and said it was an active data-center operator generating revenue. That bond now seems increasingly important. After successfully delivering capacity for the chipmaker, AMD helped connect Riot with Anthropic, Barron's says. The progression is straightforward: AMD provided proof of concept, then Anthropic provided scale. The contrast with Riot's prior business is impossible to overlook. Riot produced $647.4 million in annual revenue in 2025. The first Anthropic contract is about 14 times as large on the headline, but it will recognize those dollars slowly over several years. The potential value increases to $16.1 billion if the two options to extend are exercised. That doesn't mean Riot is a $16 billion revenue corporation overnight. It does, however, mean investors may have to stop viewing the company through the lens of Bitcoin creation. Bloomberg / Getty Images Anthropic deal reveals why power may be AI's next scarce asset Riot is part of a bigger change happening across the once-Bitcoin-mining business. For years, crypto miners have chased cheap electricity, negotiated big power hookups, and built buildings that could sustain the energy-hungry computation. Those same traits are a boon to AI engineers. The benefit is time. New data-center builders may spend years trying to get on the grid and access enough power capacity. Companies that already own those links may therefore have infrastructure with drastically increased strategic value. Riot says its development strategy is "power-first." The corporation creates the infrastructure around huge power installations, rather than buying land and hoping there will be electricity someday. Anthropic has now put a very significant dollar value on that tactic. What Riot investors should watch next * $9.1 billion: Estimated value of the initial 20-year Anthropic agreement * 191 MW: Computing capacity Riot is expected to provide at Rockdale * $16.1 billion: Potential contract value if both five-year extensions are exercised * 700 MW: Developed capacity at Riot's Rockdale campus * 2 GW: Riot's fully approved power portfolio * 50 MW: AMD's contracted capacity at Rockdale * $647.4 million: Riot's total 2025 revenue The bull has a solid argument. Riot occupies enormous power positions at a time when AI businesses are fighting over that very resource. Its long-term contracts could also make its future revenues less dependent on the well-known volatility of Bitcoin. But investors still face significant execution risk. The company then has to fund and create the infrastructure to serve Anthropic's workloads, fulfill strict dependability standards, limit construction costs, and generate acceptable returns on the necessary capital. If the underlying economics aren't sound, it's not a major concern. That's why the deal with Anthropic is so significant. It allows Riot to demonstrate that its power portfolio can sustain something considerably larger and more predictable than Bitcoin mining. For years, investors have basically valued Riot based on how much cryptocurrency the company could produce. The AI boom raises a different question: What is access to power worth? Anthropic may have just given the first serious answer. The Arena Media Brands, LLC THESTREET is a registered trademark of TheStreet, Inc. This story was originally published August 12, 2026 at 9:37 AM.

Anthropic signs $9.1 billion cloud deal with Riot, Bloomberg reports By Investing.com

Investing.com -- Anthropic (NASDAQ:ANTP) signed a $9.1 billion long-term agreement with Riot Platforms (NASDAQ:RIOT) to secure AI computing capacity, Bloomberg reported, highlighting the AI developer's aggressive push to lock in infrastructure as demand for its Claude tools continues to grow. Riot shares jumped 25% to $24.40 in late trading on Monday, after the company disclosed the data center agreement earlier that day without naming its customer. According to Bloomberg, Anthropic is the customer behind Riot's previously undisclosed data center agreement, citing people familiar with the matter. The agreement covers 191 megawatts of computing capacity at Riot's Rockdale, Texas, campus and runs through June 2048. Riot expects the contract to generate $9.1 billion in revenue, while two five-year extension options could take total sales to as much as $16.1 billion. The deal underscores the growing scramble among AI developers to secure the computing power needed to keep pace with customer demand. Bloomberg reported that Anthropic has signed several large infrastructure agreements in recent months after struggling to keep up with demand for its AI tools. Anthropic recently signed a $10 billion deal with infrastructure startup Volta Infra Holdings and agreed in May to buy nearly $45 billion worth of computing from Elon Musk's xAI, according to Bloomberg. The agreement also highlights Riot's broader strategy of turning its existing power and data center infrastructure into a business serving the AI boom. The company, which built its business around Bitcoin mining, is now among several crypto miners moving into AI data center services. Riot said earlier Monday that the data center agreement helped drive its second-quarter revenue above estimates.

Riot Platforms signs a $9.1bn deal with Anthropic and accelerates its push into AI

Riot Platforms has signed a 20-year contract with Anthropic to supply computing capacity, representing $9.1bn in revenue. The agreement covers 191 megawatts at its Rockdale, Texas campus, giving Anthropic access to power capacity already connected to the grid. The total could reach about $16.1bn with two five-year extensions. Riot shares surged more than 20% after the announcement before giving back almost all of those gains. Combined with an earlier agreement with Advanced Micro Devices, the deal lifts Riot's contracted data center revenue tied to its campus to $9.8bn. It underscores the group's gradual transformation from a company historically focused on bitcoin mining into a provider of infrastructure for artificial intelligence. This diversification is spreading across the sector, which is grappling with weak cryptocurrencies, intensifying competition, and the periodic reduction in mining rewards caused by the 'halving'.