Anthropic Locks In 191 MW of Riot Capacity Under $9.1B Long-Term AI Deal

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Riot Platforms told investors on July 30 that it had signed a 20-year lease for 191 megawatts of critical IT capacity at its Rockdale, Texas campus, worth about $9.1 billion in base contract revenue through June 2048. It called the counterparty only “a leading frontier AI lab” in both its earnings release and its subsequent SEC filing. When Needham analyst John Todaro asked CEO Jason Les for more detail on the earnings call, Les said: “We cannot comment on or speculate on the motivations of our tenants.” Eleven days later, a report citing people familiar with the matter identified the tenant as Anthropic. Riot shares, which had closed regular trading down 5.6% at $19.40, jumped as much as 25% in after-hours trading, touching $24.30. Neither Riot nor Anthropic has confirmed the identity publicly.

The Terms Riot Actually Disclosed

The lease delivers capacity in two phases: 96 MW by December 2027, with the remaining 95 MW by June 2028. Riot projects cumulative net operating income of $7.3 billion to $8.2 billion over the base term, an average of $365 million to $411 million a year.

• Two five-year extension options, exercisable by the tenant, could push total contract value to roughly $16.1 billion.
• Morgan Stanley is providing a $573 million interim credit facility to fund initial construction, structured as non-recourse to Riot Platforms itself.

The deal sits alongside Riot’s existing Rockdale lease with AMD, which has 25 MW commissioned and up to 200 MW available through further options. Les told investors the two leases together represent 241 megawatts and about $9.8 billion in contracted revenue at the site.

Riot Joins a Growing Miner-to-AI Infrastructure Pipeline

Riot’s arrangement echoes one Anthropic has already put its name on. In December, Hut 8 announced a 15-year, 245 MW lease at its River Bend campus in Louisiana, worth $7.0 billion at base and up to $17.7 billion with three five-year renewals. Fluidstack operates the compute, Google backstops the lease payments for the base term, and Anthropic’s head of compute, James Bradbury, was quoted by name in the release describing it as “an expansion of our existing work with Fluidstack.” A similar Fluidstack arrangement exists at TeraWulf’s Lake Mariner site, where Google took an 8% equity stake in exchange for a 200-plus MW, 10-year hosting commitment; TeraWulf’s own materials undisclose who the end compute customer is.

The Same Week, Anthropic Made Two Other Moves

On August 10, the same day the Riot report circulated, Anthropic announced it had formed a separate venture called Theseus Infrastructure with Macquarie Asset Management and GIC. Funds managed by Macquarie and GIC will own the platform and fund the majority of the equity for each project; Anthropic will act as anchor tenant under long-term leases. Neither company disclosed a dollar figure or a capacity target. That announcement followed Anthropic’s April deal for multiple gigawatts of Google and Broadcom TPU capacity starting in 2027, and its May agreement to pay Elon Musk’s xAI roughly $1.25 billion a month for compute, a commitment to be worth up to $45 billion through 2029. Anthropic disclosed in April that its run-rate revenue had passed $30 billion, up from about $9 billion at the end of 2025, as Anthropic faced a separate Pentagon dispute over its risk designation.

Why Miners Are Becoming AI Infrastructure Partners

Lined up together, the four deals sort into distinct categories rather than one undifferentiated buying spree. Theseus puts sovereign and institutional capital on the hook for ground-up construction, with Anthropic committing only to lease payments once sites are built. The Google/Broadcom and xAI deals buy capacity from vendors that already operate at scale, while Anthropic AI security remains an important consideration as the company expands its infrastructure and AI workloads.

The miner leases are different again: Hut 8 and, apparently, Riot are smaller companies with existing land, power interconnects, and now heavy incentive to support Anthropic’s expanding AI infrastructure requirements, including capacity associated with Anthropic Claude Fable 5.

• Bitcoin mining revenue: $113.7 million in the second quarter, down from $140.9 million a year earlier.
• Data center revenue: $23.2 million so far, with projected annual NOI of $365 million to $411 million once Rockdale is fully built out.
• Net income: Riot swung from $219.5 million in net income a year ago to a $237.2 million net loss this quarter.
• April 2024 halving: The reward per mined block fell from 6.25 bitcoin to 3.125.

For a company that swung from $219.5 million in net income a year ago to a $237.2 million net loss this quarter, a two-decade lease at those NOI levels is a materially different business than mining.

What Still Has to Clear Before 2028

Rockdale’s build-out now depends on Texas regulators who are looking harder at exactly this kind of project. On August 3, Governor Greg Abbott directed state regulators to audit every data center in ERCOT’s interconnection queue, citing risk to grid reliability from what his office called “unprecedented load growth.” That queue holds more than 1,800 projects requesting over 474 gigawatts, and roughly 90% of those requests come from data centers. Riot’s own SEC filing on the Rockdale lease discloses financing terms and delivery dates but no risk factors specific to grid interconnection delay. Riot has said the first 96 MW is due in December 2027 and the rest by June 2028. Whether that schedule holds now depends partly on how Texas’s audit treats the queue Rockdale sits in, and partly on whether the anonymously sourced identity of the tenant is ever confirmed by the two companies that would know for certain.