Riot Platforms Soars on $9.1 Billion, 20-Year Data Center Deal With Anthropic
Riot Platforms delivered Tuesday's most striking single-stock move, surging after the company announced a $9.1 billion data center agreement that Bloomberg reported was struck with Anthropic, the AI developer behind the Claude models. The 20-year lease covers 191 megawatts of capacity and represents the largest commitment yet in Riot's transformation from bitcoin mining company to AI infrastructure landlord.
The stock ripped roughly 17% higher in premarket trading, according to Yahoo Finance, and was still up about 12% by late morning, per Investrade — extending a year-to-date gain that stood near 37% before the announcement. CoinDesk reported the shares climbed as much as 20% in early activity as investors digested the scale and duration of the contract.
Chief Executive Jason Les framed the agreement as a turning point for the company. "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 remarks carried by Yahoo Finance. Notably, Riot's own materials described the counterparty only as a frontier AI lab; Bloomberg and other outlets identified the customer as Anthropic.
The deal is the second major capacity agreement Riot has signed this year. In January, the company announced its first significant data center lease, with chipmaker AMD, at its Rockdale, Texas campus, as reported by Yahoo Finance. The progression from that initial contract to a multibillion-dollar, two-decade commitment illustrates how quickly former crypto-mining operators with access to power and land have become sought-after partners for AI companies racing to secure compute capacity.
That pivot has been showing up in the financials. Riot reported second-quarter revenue of $174.2 million, up 14% from a year earlier, with growth driven by its data center and engineering businesses rather than mining, according to Investrade and Yahoo Finance. The Anthropic agreement gives the company something bitcoin mining never could: long-duration, contracted revenue insulated from the swings of cryptocurrency prices.
For Anthropic, the lease adds to an aggressive infrastructure buildout. Industry coverage, including from TradingKey, characterized the Riot arrangement as the latest in a series of large compute commitments by the AI developer, which has been locking up power and data center capacity across multiple partners as demand for its models grows. Bitcoin miners, with their existing grid connections and energy expertise, have emerged as a fast route to bringing new capacity online.
The announcement also reverberated across the sector. Fermi jumped about 22% Tuesday after securing a $6.5 billion data center lease with TensorWave, per Investrade — evidence that investors are rewarding any company able to convert power assets into signed AI capacity agreements.
The enthusiasm comes with open questions, including execution risk on a buildout of this scale and the concentration that comes with a single anchor tenant over 20 years. But for a company that entered the year still widely categorized as a bitcoin miner, Tuesday's deal marks an emphatic re-rating of what the market believes Riot's assets are worth.
