Anthropic Signs $9.1B Riot Deal, Bitcoin Miners Turn AI Landlords

Summary

• Riot Platforms signed a 20-year, $9.1 billion data center lease reportedly with Anthropic, per Bloomberg.
• Riot will supply 191 megawatts of power and data center capacity at its Rockdale, Texas site.
• Riot stock jumped more than 25% after the deal became public.
• The agreement follows a similar $19 billion lease Anthropic signed with TeraWulf in July.

Riot Platforms has signed a $9.1 billion, 20-year data center lease with an unnamed ‘leading frontier AI lab,’ running through June 2048 with options for two five-year extensions that could push the total value to $16.1 billion. Bloomberg identified the counterparty as Anthropic, citing people familiar with the matter; neither company has confirmed it publicly. Riot will dedicate 191 megawatts of power and data center capacity from its Rockdale, Texas campus to the AI company, with the full capacity expected online by June 2028. News of the deal sent Riot shares up more than 25% in after-hours trading, reaching $24.40.

Why a Bitcoin miner became Anthropic’s landlord

Bitcoin mining companies control two things the AI industry is desperate for: permitted land and grid-connected electrical capacity. Building a new data center from scratch can take years of permitting, transmission upgrades, and negotiations with utilities. Miners like Riot already cleared those hurdles years ago to run mining rigs, which gives them a shortcut that AI developers are willing to pay a premium for. Rather than continue directing that power toward Bitcoin hashing, Riot is renting the capacity to a tenant that offers steadier, higher-margin revenue.

The 191 megawatts committed to Anthropic is capacity that Riot could otherwise use to expand its own mining operations. By capping that growth, the company is trading exposure to Bitcoin’s price swings for a fixed, long-term income stream.

Riot’s earnings pressure made the timing pointed

The announcement landed right after Riot’s second-quarter earnings report, which showed revenue rising 14% year-over-year to $174.2 million alongside a net loss of $237.2 million tied to the costs of restructuring toward AI infrastructure. A steady, contracted revenue stream worth roughly $455 million a year gives Riot something its Bitcoin mining business has never reliably offered: predictability. Mining revenue rises and falls with Bitcoin’s price and network difficulty, while a two-decade lease with a well-funded AI company does not.

Les described the Anthropic lease on the earnings call as marking ‘a defining moment in our evolution into a leading developer of large-scale data centers.

Riot has also been funding part of this transition by selling down its own Bitcoin holdings. Earlier in 2026, the company liquidated 3,778 BTC in a single quarter, putting the proceeds toward construction and power infrastructure upgrades rather than holding the coins on its balance sheet. It marks a shift from treating Bitcoin as a treasury asset to treating it as a financing tool for a different business entirely.

Starboard Value spent months pressuring Riot’s board over a simple math problem: 1.7 gigawatts of available power capacity, all going toward Bitcoin hashing instead of higher-margin AI tenants. The Anthropic lease is the activist firm’s thesis made concrete.

What changes for how investors value mining companies

Wall Street’s yardstick for public Bitcoin miners has been shifting for a while, and this deal accelerates it. Exahashes per second, the traditional measure of a miner’s raw computing power dedicated to Bitcoin, matters less to investors now than megawatts of energized grid capacity. That’s because MW figures translate directly into AI leasing revenue, while EH/s only measures exposure to a single, volatile asset.

Riot is not alone in making this trade. TeraWulf and Hut 8 have been early movers in the pivot, with Anthropic itself signing a parallel $19 billion lease with TeraWulf just weeks earlier, on July 6. Iris Energy has leaned into Microsoft-backed AI scaling agreements, and Core Scientific set an earlier precedent with its CoreWeave contracts. Collectively, the shift represents tens of billions of dollars moving out of pure Bitcoin mining and into AI infrastructure leasing across the public mining sector.

For traders watching RIOT, the practical effect is that the stock now carries two separate valuation cases layered on top of each other: a Bitcoin-mining business that still moves with BTC price and network difficulty, and a fixed-income-like data center business whose value depends on lease execution rather than crypto markets. That split is part of why the after-hours reaction was sharper than a typical earnings pop — the market was repricing which case dominates.

What Riot’s next move might look like

Riot’s own earnings call points to where this goes next. Beyond the Anthropic and AMD leases, Riot’s Corsicana campus is now under a non-binding letter of intent with a single tenant, a signal the company plans to replicate the Rockdale structure at a second site rather than treat this deal as one-off. CEO Jason Les framed the pitch to future tenants around three advantages: ‘fully approved and energized multi-gigawatt-scale power capacity,’ a track record of on-time delivery with AMD, and now a second contracted frontier lab. With 241 MW already leased across two tenants, the pressure shifts to whether Riot can convert its remaining gigawatt-plus of developed capacity into similar long-term contracts before rival miners lock up the same pool of AI tenants.