Riot Secures $9.1B Deal with Anthropic, Shifts From Bitcoin to AI Infrastructure

RIOT disclosed a 20-year data center lease covering 191 megawatts of critical IT capacity at its Rockdale, Texas campus, an agreement the company expects to generate roughly $9.1 billion in contract revenue over the initial term . Riot described the counterparty only as a leading frontier AI lab; Bloomberg identified the tenant as Anthropic . Shares jumped more than 20% in after-hours and pre-market trading on the disclosure, after closing down 5.46% in the prior session.

The economics are staged rather than immediate. Capacity is scheduled to come online in phases, reaching 96 megawatts by December 2027 and the full 191 megawatts by June 2028, with the lease running through June 2048 . Two five-year extension options could lift total contract value to approximately $16.1 billion, though those options sit with the tenant and are not committed revenue today .

This is Riot's second AI tenant at Rockdale, not its first. The company signed an initial 25-megawatt lease with AMD in January 2026 and AMD has since exercised an option for another 25 megawatts, taking that agreement to 50 megawatts and roughly $311 million over a 10-year initial term . Combined, Riot now has about 241 megawatts of critical IT capacity contracted, which recasts a company valued as a bitcoin miner into something closer to a power-and-shell landlord for AI compute, the same pivot underway at peers including IREN, Applied Digital and TeraWulf .

What matters from here is execution rather than headline value. None of the $9.1 billion converts to revenue until capacity is energized, so the delivery milestones in December 2027 and June 2028, the capital required to build the shells, grid interconnection timing in ERCOT, and how much hashrate Riot gives up to free that power are the variables that decide whether contracted revenue becomes realized cash flow .

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