Riot Platforms Shares Climb 3.81% as Its $9.1 Billion Anthropic Data Center Deal Keeps Steadily Paying Off

Shares of Riot Platforms Inc. rose 3.81% to $20.45 in Wednesday trading, adding 75 cents, as the bitcoin mining company's continued transformation into an AI data center operator kept drawing investor interest more than a month after it struck a landmark computing capacity deal with Anthropic.

Riot disclosed on August 10 that it had signed a 20-year agreement to supply 191 megawatts of data center capacity, enough electricity to power roughly 143,000 homes at any given moment, from its campus in Rockdale, Texas, to what the company initially described only as a leading frontier AI lab. Bloomberg News reported, citing people familiar with the matter, that the customer was Anthropic, the AI company behind the Claude chatbot. The agreement, which runs through June 2048, is expected to generate approximately $9.1 billion in contracted revenue, with two additional five-year extension options that could push the total potential value of the deal to roughly $16.1 billion if fully exercised.

News of the deal, announced alongside Riot's second-quarter earnings, sent shares surging as much as 25% in after-hours trading the day it broke, before the stock opened the following session up between 17% and 20%, depending on the specific measurement point cited by different market trackers. Riot Chief Executive Officer Jason Les framed the agreement as a pivotal moment in the company's ongoing evolution beyond its origins as a pure-play bitcoin miner. Today's announcement of a landmark 20-year, 191-megawatt data center lease with a leading frontier AI lab marks a defining moment in our evolution into a leading developer of large-scale data centers, Les said in the company's earnings release.

The Anthropic agreement built directly on an earlier deal Riot struck with Advanced Micro Devices, which had already established a presence at the same Rockdale campus. Combined, the two agreements give Riot what Les described as a two-tenant data center campus, bringing the company's total signed capacity to 241 megawatts and approximately $9.8 billion in long-term contracted revenue, all secured within roughly six months, according to the company.

Riot plans to bring the newly contracted Anthropic capacity online in stages, targeting 96 megawatts by December 2027 and completion of the full 191-megawatt buildout by June 2028. To fund the project's early construction phase, the company arranged a $573 million interim financing facility through Morgan Stanley while it works to put a permanent credit backstop in place for the longer-term buildout.

Wall Street's reaction to the deal has remained largely positive in the weeks since it was announced. Compass Point analyst Michael Donovan described the arrangement in a research note as evidence of Riot's transformation into a company carrying substantial contracted data center revenue, noting the campus now represents a meaningful, diversified revenue base beyond bitcoin mining alone. Bernstein raised its price target on Riot shares to $35 following the announcement, while Citi lifted its own target to $32, with both firms characterizing the deal as transformational for the company's business model even as Riot continued to post sizable quarterly net losses.

Those losses remain substantial in absolute terms. Riot reported second-quarter revenue of $174.2 million, up 14% from $153 million a year earlier, with bitcoin mining contributing $113.7 million of that total and the company's newer data center segment contributing $23.2 million. Despite the revenue growth, Riot posted a net loss of $237.2 million for the quarter, a figure that underscores the heavy upfront capital costs associated with the company's ongoing pivot toward large-scale data center construction, even as its longer-term contracted revenue base has expanded sharply.

Riot's shift mirrors a broader trend across the bitcoin mining industry, where companies with access to large, power-rich sites have increasingly moved to lease that capacity to AI developers rather than relying solely on cryptocurrency mining for revenue. Industry participants have described the shift as a response to a prolonged period of subdued conditions in the bitcoin mining business, pushing miners to seek steadier, longer-duration revenue streams tied to the broader boom in AI infrastructure spending. Shares of other AI-data-center-adjacent miners, including IREN, Applied Digital and TeraWulf, posted more modest gains of around 2% on the day Riot's deal was first announced, suggesting the initial rally was driven primarily by company-specific factors tied to Riot's own agreement rather than a broad rerating of the entire sector.

For Anthropic, the Riot agreement represented its third major computing capacity procurement within a roughly three-month span, part of a broader pattern of large infrastructure commitments that have collectively totaled tens of billions of dollars as the company works to secure sufficient computing capacity to meet growing customer demand for its AI models, while competing for infrastructure access against rivals including OpenAI and Google.

Riot purchased the 200-acre Rockdale site outright in January for $96 million, having previously operated the location under a long-term ground lease, giving the company direct ownership of the land underpinning both its bitcoin mining operations and its expanding data center business. The company said it began developing its data center business in earnest in 2025, generating its first data center revenue in the first quarter of 2026, a business line that has scaled rapidly in the months since as demand for AI computing capacity has continued to accelerate nationally.

With construction on the Anthropic-contracted capacity now underway and staged delivery targeted through mid-2028, investors are likely to continue watching Riot's progress on the Rockdale buildout closely in the coming quarters, treating the pace of construction and capacity activation as a key indicator of how successfully the company can convert its newly signed, multibillion-dollar contract backlog into recognized revenue over the life of the agreement.

Source: https://www.ibtimes.com.au/riot-platforms-anthropic-ai-data-centre-deal-1875646