Shares of Riot Platforms surged as much as 25% after hours Monday and were trading up nearly 10% in Tuesday's session after Bloomberg identified Anthropic — the maker of the Claude AI assistant — as the tenant behind a landmark $9.1 billion, 20-year data-center lease at Riot's Rockdale, Texas campus. Riot had described the counterparty only as "a leading frontier AI lab"; Bloomberg reported Monday that the unnamed partner is Anthropic. The revelation turns a former crypto miner into one of the largest contracted landlords in the AI infrastructure race.
• A Single Contract Worth More Than a Decade of Mining Revenue
The lease covers 191 megawatts of IT capacity at Riot's Rockdale campus — enough power to run roughly 143,000 homes.
Two five-year extension options could raise the total contract value to $16.1 billion. For context, Riot's trailing twelve-month revenue is around $650 million. The base contract alone dwarfs anything the mining operation has produced and gives Riot a visible, recurring revenue stream investors have never had reason to underwrite before.
• Wall Street Is Already Repricing the Stock as an AI Play
Bernstein raised its RIOT price target to $35 and Citi to $32, calling the deal transformational despite Riot's $237 million quarterly net loss.
The scale of the revenue backlog "is what has traders repricing the stock as an AI infrastructure play rather than a pure crypto miner." That shift matters because data-center landlords typically command higher valuation multiples than volatile mining operations.
• The Buildout Clock Is Ticking — and It's Being Funded by Selling Bitcoin
Delivery is phased: 96 megawatts are due by December 2027 and the full 191 megawatts by June 2028.
Riot secured a $573 million interim financing facility from Morgan Stanley to fund early development , but the company has also been selling its monthly Bitcoin output, with holdings falling from 15,680 BTC to 11,380 BTC during Q2 — a decrease of 4,300 coins. Missing delivery milestones would jeopardize the contract's economics entirely.
• Peers Are Chasing the Same Playbook, but Riot Has a Head Start
Firms including Core Scientific, IREN, Applied Digital, TeraWulf, and Hut 8 are pursuing AI and high-performance computing deals of their own. Yet Riot's second major AI lease in 2026 — following a January contract with AMD — gives it roughly 241 MW committed and approximately $9.8 billion in contracted revenue , a backlog few rivals can match. Execution, not ambition, is now the only variable that matters.