Riot Platforms Stock Jumps on $9 Billion AI Infrastructure Venture with Anthropic

Riot Platforms, a company that built its name and valuation mining Bitcoin, has just signed a $9.1 billion, 20-year agreement to supply artificial intelligence infrastructure to Anthropic. The market reaction was immediate and violent: Riot's stock surged as much as 25% in overnight trading before settling into an 18% gain by Tuesday morning.[1][2][8]

Wall Street is aggressively repricing the company. By locking in nearly a decade of predictable, utility-like cash flows from one of the world's leading frontier AI labs, Riot is shedding the volatility of the cryptocurrency markets and repositioning itself as a foundational pillar of the AI boom.[1][7]

The mechanism of the deal centers on raw, industrial power. Under the terms of the agreement, Riot will provide 191 megawatts of critical IT capacity from its massive Rockdale, Texas, campus to Anthropic. To put that figure into perspective, 191 megawatts is enough electricity to continuously power roughly 143,000 homes.[2][6]

Delivery of this infrastructure will be staged to match Anthropic's scaling needs. The first 96 megawatts are expected to come online by December 2027, with the full 191-megawatt deployment scheduled for completion by June 2028.[2][6][8]

The financial stakes for Riot are transformational. The base 20-year lease is expected to generate $9.1 billion in contracted revenue through June 2048. Furthermore, the contract includes two optional five-year extensions, which could ultimately push the total value of the agreement to $16.1 billion.[2][3][6]

To fund the massive buildout, which carries estimated development costs of $2.1 billion to $2.3 billion—or roughly $11 million to $12 million per megawatt—Riot has secured a $573 million interim financing facility from Morgan Stanley. This bridge loan will cover early development costs until a permanent credit backstop is finalized.[2][6]

The pivot mechanism driving this deal answers a fundamental question: why is a leading AI lab turning to a Bitcoin miner for its computing needs? The answer lies in the most scarce resource in the current technology landscape: energized land.[5][6]

Bitcoin miners have spent the last decade securing massive, grid-connected power agreements and building industrial-scale cooling facilities. For AI developers racing to train increasingly large language models, leasing existing power infrastructure is significantly faster than navigating the years-long regulatory approvals and interconnection studies required to build new data centers from scratch.[4][5]

Riot is not alone in recognizing this arbitrage opportunity. Other major cryptocurrency mining firms, including Core Scientific, TeraWulf, IREN, and Hut 8, have also begun repositioning themselves as high-performance computing (HPC) and AI infrastructure operators. However, the sheer scale of the Anthropic deal places Riot in a category of its own.[1][5]

The transaction fundamentally alters Riot's valuation model. According to an analysis from Bernstein, which subsequently raised its price target for the stock to $35, a staggering 84% of Riot's enterprise value is now derived from its AI colocation business.[7][8]

By contrast, only 11% of the company's value is now attributed to its core Bitcoin mining operations, with the remaining 5% tied to its actual balance sheet holdings of the digital currency. For one of the industry's largest publicly traded miners, artificial intelligence has officially overtaken Bitcoin as the primary investment thesis.[7]

The sheer scale of the Anthropic contract allowed investors to completely look past Riot's second-quarter earnings report, which was released simultaneously. The company reported a net loss of $237.2 million for the quarter, but traders focused entirely on the multi-year revenue backlog.[8]

While Bitcoin mining still generated $113.7 million in revenue during the quarter, the company's nascent data center business contributed $23.2 million. That figure is expected to explode once the Anthropic capacity, along with other recent deals, comes fully online.[6]

Anthropic is actually the second major AI tenant to set up shop at Riot's Rockdale campus. In January 2026, the company signed a separate agreement with Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) to build specialized AI computing infrastructure.[2][3]

Combined, the Anthropic and AMD contracts give Riot 241 megawatts of contracted IT capacity at the Texas site. Together, these agreements represent approximately $9.8 billion of long-term, contracted revenue, providing a massive financial cushion against future crypto winters.[2][5][8]

Despite the market euphoria, significant execution risks remain. Retrofitting Bitcoin mining facilities for the dense, liquid-cooled server racks required by modern AI graphics processing units is a complex and highly capital-intensive engineering challenge.[5][6]

Furthermore, a 20-year contract is an eternity in the fast-moving artificial intelligence sector. The deal assumes that frontier AI labs will continue to require massive, centralized power footprints for decades to come, and that Anthropic will remain a dominant player capable of honoring a multi-billion-dollar lease.[3][7]

For now, however, the transaction provides a clear and highly lucrative blueprint for the cryptocurrency mining industry. By monetizing their hard-won power assets, miners can successfully transition from speculative digital asset producers to foundational utilities of the AI era.[1][5]