Riot Platforms’ ongoing pivot from bitcoin mining to AI infrastructure took its latest major step this week through a lease contract with one of the space’s leading labs. On Monday, Bloomberg named Anthropic as the tenant of the firm’s 200-acre campus in Rockdale, Texas. Riot announced the deal alongside its Q2 earnings several hours earlier, but did not name the client.
Anthropic will pay a reported $9.1 billion over the course of a 20-year lease, in exchange for 191 megawatts of data center capacity (approximately the power load drawn by 143,000 homes at any one moment).
The Rockdale campus was previously dedicated primarily to cryptocurrency mining, with AMD signed on for a smaller 25-megawatt deal. Now the majority of the facility’s developed data-center capacity will be dedicated to Anthropic until June 2048.
It will still take some time for Riot to increase the site’s capacity to these levels, however. Riot expects the Rockdale site to reach 96 megawatts by December next year, then the full 191-megawatt capacity by June 2028. The early expansion is currently being financed by Morgan Stanley, while Riot seeks a permanent credit backstop.
This will help address one of the biggest bottlenecks facing the AI lab: processing capacity. This is the reason that even premium subscribers to its platform are still subject to usage caps for its most advanced models.
The AI pivot has provided a boost for crypto mining companies
In recent years, cryptocurrency mining firms have begun evolving to meet that demand; these miners spent a decade securing cheap power contracts, substations and grid interconnections in places like rural Texas, which are exactly the assets AI labs need and cannot build quickly.
With cryptocurrency prices heavily compressed, contracts with these AI labs can provide a more reliable source of income that does not fluctuate with multi-year market cycles. Riot announced its own move into AI data centers in 2024, but the project has ramped up significantly through 2026. Its first deal was signed with AMD in January this year.
Once the Rockdale site is at full capacity, Riot expects to generate a net operating income of between $365 million and $411 million annually.
The lease announcement saw the company’s stock rise 25% in after-hours trading, after closing 5% down for the day at $19.40. Its shares then closed at $20.24 on Tuesday. Analysts at Cantor Fitzgerald, Bernstein and Piper Sandler all raised their price targets that morning.
Riot’s relatively weak Monday before the announcement came alongside a mixed earnings report the same day. The firm reported a 14% rise in revenue to $174.2 million, of which approximately 13% came from its data-center business.
Riot swung to a net loss of $237.2 million, or $0.68 per diluted share, from net income of $219.5 million a year earlier, and its bitcoin treasury fell from 15,679 at the end of Q1 to 11,380 at the end of Q2 as it sold to fund construction.
Anthropic’s data center deals have gathered pace in 2026
This is just the latest major deal signed by Anthropic this year. In July, the firm signed a 20-year lease with TeraWulf for a 401-megawatt facility in Hawesville, Kentucky. One month later, Bloomberg reported a new $10 billion deal with cloud startup Volta Infra Holdings for processing capacity at its facilities in Norway. Anthropic’s total compute expenditure is unknown, so it’s not entirely clear how the Rockdale deal fits into its overall strategy.
What is clear is that the company is increasingly spreading its compute requirements across a broader network of infrastructure providers, rather than relying solely on capacity supplied by its major cloud partners. Whether this will be reflected in its premium account usage caps in the near future remains to be seen.