Anthropic leases 191 MW from Bitcoin miner Riot

Anthropic has signed a long-term lease with Riot Platforms for 191 megawatts of data center capacity at Riot’s Rockdale, Texas campus. The base value is $9.1 billion over 20 years; with two optional five-year extensions, the deal could grow to as much as $16.5 billion, according to industry outlet DCD.

The timeline is ambitious: the first 96 megawatts are slated to go live in December 2027, with full commissioning planned for June 2028. The project is backed by a $573 million bridge financing facility from Morgan Stanley.

For Riot Platforms, the contract marks the next step in a remarkable transformation: the company, which grew up on Bitcoin mining, is increasingly positioning itself as a developer of large-scale data centers for AI and high-performance computing. Anthropic is the site’s second major tenant after AMD. Markets rewarded the deal – Riot’s stock jumped about 17 percent.

For Anthropic, the lease is another building block in the race for compute: frontier AI labs are locking in power and floor space at record pace, as training and inference demand outgrows what the traditional data center market can supply.