Anthropic Leases 191 MW From a Bitcoin Miner for $9.1B

Bitcoin miner Riot Platforms has signed a $9.1 billion agreement to lease 191 megawatts of IT capacity to a frontier AI lab. Riot did not name the counterparty in its announcement; Bloomberg subsequently reported, citing people familiar with the transaction, that the tenant is Anthropic.

The capacity sits at Riot's Rockdale campus in Texas and arrives in phases: 96 megawatts by December 2027, with the full 191 megawatts due by June 2028. The lease runs 20 years, through June 2048, and carries two five-year extension options that would lift the total contract value to $16.1 billion if both are exercised. Riot has secured a $573 million interim financing facility from Morgan Stanley to cover development costs.

For Riot the deal is a pivot, not a sideline. The company reported second-quarter revenue of $174.2 million against a net loss of $237.2 million — the familiar squeeze on bitcoin miners whose power contracts and shells are worth more to AI labs than to hashing. CEO Jason Les said Riot has now executed leases totalling 241 megawatts in just over six months, representing roughly $9.8 billion of long-term contracted revenue with what he called two of the most important companies in the AI ecosystem. Riot shares closed down 5.46% on Monday, then jumped 25.26% in after-hours trading to $24.30.

On Anthropic's side the lease is one more line in an aggressive compute build-out that increasingly runs outside the traditional hyperscalers. The company has already committed to SpaceX's Colossus data center and sits at the center of Google's TPU financing structure. Signing a two-decade lease with a bitcoin miner extends the same logic: the binding constraint is energized megawatts on a schedule, and whoever already holds the interconnect gets the contract.

The timelines are worth noting against the size of the number. Nothing here is capacity Anthropic can use this year — first power lands in late 2027, and the headline $9.1 billion is base revenue spread across two decades. What the deal actually buys is a claim on Texas grid capacity that will not exist for another 18 months, priced today because by 2028 it will not be available at any price.

Riot has not confirmed the tenant on the record, and Anthropic has not commented publicly. Until one of them does, the identification rests on Bloomberg's sourcing rather than a filing.