Riot Jumps 20% on Anthropic AI Deal as Bitcoin Sales Surge 56%
Riot Platforms (NASDAQ: RIOT) shares rose 20.7% during premarket trading on Tuesday, after Anthropic was identified as the customer behind a $9.1 billion data center deal that accelerates the bitcoin miner’s transformation into an AI infrastructure provider.
Riot jumped about 25% in extended trading Monday following a Bloomberg report on Monday about Anthropic being the customer, reversing a selloff during the regular session across companies exposed to Bitcoin mining and AI infrastructure. The shares continued to rise during pre-market hours on Tuesday.
The agreement comes as Riot is rapidly liquidating its Bitcoin treasury while committing capital to data-center development. The company sold 5,887 Bitcoin in the second quarter, 56% more than the 3,778 sold during the first three months of the year.
Second-quarter sales were about 3.7 times the 1,587 Bitcoin Riot produced. In the first quarter, it sold roughly 2.6 times its production of 1,473 Bitcoin, according to company filings and its latest results.
With the accelerated bitcoin sales, Riot’s holdings consequently fell 27% to 11,380 Bitcoin at June 30 from 15,679 three months earlier.
Riot has said it evaluates the amount of Bitcoin retained on its balance sheet against the cash needed for operations and expansion. Its first-quarter sales generated approximately $289.5 million of proceeds. The company also used about 1,080 Bitcoin in January to fund the $96 million purchase of land beneath its Rockdale, Texas, facility.
Anthropic, the developer of the Claude family of AI models, agreed to lease 191 megawatts of critical information-technology capacity at Rockdale, Bloomberg reported, citing people familiar with the matter. Riot had described the tenant only as a “leading frontier AI” company when it disclosed the contract alongside its second-quarter results Monday.
The agreement runs for 20 years through June 2048 and is expected to generate about $9.1 billion of revenue during the initial term, Riot said. Two five-year renewal options could increase its potential value to approximately $16.1 billion.
The deal is one of the clearest signs yet of Riot’s attempt to turn its large power portfolio into an AI data-center business, reducing its dependence on the volatile economics of Bitcoin mining. The 191-megawatt load is comparable to the electricity needed to serve roughly 143,000 homes at any given moment.
Riot expects the contract to contribute cumulative net operating income of $7.3 billion to $8.2 billion during the initial term, or an annual average of $365 million to $411 million. Those estimates remain subject to construction, financing and operating risks.
The company plans to deliver the capacity in stages. The first 96 megawatts are scheduled to become available in December 2027, with the full deployment targeted for June 2028.
Morgan Stanley is providing a $573 million interim financing facility for initial development costs while an investment-grade credit backstop is finalized, according to Riot.
The transaction makes Anthropic the second data center tenant at Rockdale. Riot announced an initial 25-megawatt lease with Advanced Micro Devices Inc. in January and later expanded AMD’s contracted capacity to 50 megawatts. The initial AMD deployment is operating, while the additional capacity is scheduled to be completed by May 2027.
Together, the Anthropic and AMD agreements cover 241 megawatts and represent about $9.8 billion of contracted revenue, Riot said. Its Rockdale site has 700 megawatts of developed power capacity.
The contracts put Riot among a group of bitcoin miners seeking to recast themselves as landlords and infrastructure providers for AI developers. Miners including IREN, Cipher Digital (NASDAQ: CIFR), TeraWulf (NASDAQ: WULF) , Hut 8 (NASDAQ: HUT), and Core Scientific (NASDAQ: CORZ) have pursued similar projects, capitalizing on their access to land, grid connections and large blocks of power.
