Riot Platforms Strikes $9.1 Billion AI Infrastructure Deal With Anthropic Over 20 Years

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.

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 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'.