The 20-year contract at Rockdale, Texas is worth $9.1 billion at floor and up to $16.1 billion with two five-year extensions. It is Riot's second AI-compute lease inside six months.
Riot Platforms confirmed on Tuesday that it has signed a 20-year lease for 191 megawatts of its Rockdale, Texas campus to a "leading frontier AI lab" that Bloomberg, CNBC and The Block have identified as Anthropic. The contracted revenue over the initial term runs to $9.1 billion, and two optional five-year extensions could take the headline figure to $16.1 billion.
The first 96 megawatts are scheduled to come online in December 2027, with the balance following by June 2028. To fund the build-out Riot has secured a $573 million interim facility from Morgan Stanley and said it is working toward a longer-term investment-grade backstop. Investors treated the announcement as validation of the pivot: Riot's shares climbed roughly 17 per cent on Tuesday after a bigger jump in the overnight session.
Chief executive Jason Les called the agreement "a defining moment in our evolution into a leading developer of large-scale data centres". That framing is accurate. Six months ago Riot's principal business was hashing SHA-256. It has now signed two long-duration AI-compute leases inside that window, the first with Advanced Micro Devices earlier in the year, which together commit 241 megawatts and roughly $9.8 billion in future revenue.
This is not a diversification story. Rockdale is the largest bitcoin mining facility in North America by megawatt draw, and the 191-megawatt block going to Anthropic is a meaningful chunk of the site's capacity. What replaces the mining rigs is Anthropic-grade compute: GPUs, high-density cooling, redundant power, the whole stack that inference workloads require. Riot has effectively agreed to convert the majority of a bitcoin campus into somebody else's AI data centre, and to sit on the freehold as a landlord for two decades.
The economics explain why. Bitcoin's hashprice has trailed the cost of new-generation hardware for most of 2026, and the miners still able to add megawatts have been re-underwriting them at hyperscaler rates that pay for the power infrastructure faster than any block reward does. TeraWulf's $19 billion, 20-year lease with Anthropic in July made the point at a bigger scale; MARA's move to pledge over half its bitcoin treasury against a gas-plant bid made it under different mechanics. IREN raised its AI cloud target to $4 billion after selling out earlier deployments. Riot's second lease inside six months is the same story with a different balance sheet.
Anthropic's side of the deal is the more interesting one, because the company remains private and has not officially confirmed either the Riot or the TeraWulf agreement. That two of the largest listed bitcoin miners have now booked long-duration capacity to the same counterparty tells you what Anthropic's power backlog looks like. It also gives markets a de facto valuation input: combined signed contract value across the two miners is roughly $28 billion of Anthropic-committed spend over 20 years, and the company has not filed an S-1.
For Riot, the immediate operational question is how quickly the Rockdale substation and cooling loops can be rebuilt for GPU density. The 96-megawatt first phase requires roughly 16 months from signature to energisation, which is aggressive for a retrofit and normal for a greenfield hyperscale build; Riot is treating the site as the latter. The interim Morgan Stanley facility covers initial construction. The longer-term investment-grade financing is the piece that determines whether the deal is dilutive to equity.
Bitcoin miners spent the last cycle arguing that their power contracts, substations and cooling gave them a natural pivot into AI. For most of 2024 and 2025 that pitch went unrewarded. In 2026 it has become the thesis. Riot's stock closed roughly 17 per cent higher on Tuesday. Its bitcoin operations are still running.
