Anthropic has signed a 20-year, $9.1 billion lease for 191 megawatts of computing capacity at Riot Platforms' Rockdale, Texas campus, lifting the Bitcoin(BTC) miner's shares. Key Points: Riot
Anthropic has signed a 20-year, $9.1 billion lease for 191 megawatts of computing capacity at Riot Platforms' Rockdale, Texas campus, lifting the Bitcoin(BTC) miner's shares.
- Riot Platforms secured a 20-year lease expected to generate roughly $9.1 billion, with two five-year extensions that could lift the figure to $16.1 billion.
- The 191 megawatts at Rockdale will arrive in two phases, 96 megawatts in December 2027 and the balance by June 2028.
- Five brokerages raised price targets on Riot within hours, with Bernstein now tying 84% of its valuation to AI colocation.
Riot disclosed the agreement Monday alongside its delayed second-quarter results, describing the tenant in its Aug. 10 filing only as one of the world's leading frontier AI labs. Later reporting identified Anthropic as the customer, citing people familiar with the private discussions.
The contract runs through June 2048 and carries two optional five-year extensions that, if exercised, would push potential revenue to roughly $16.1 billion. Riot plans to bring 96 megawatts online in December 2027, then deliver the remaining 95 megawatts by June 2028. Morgan Stanley is funding early development with a $573 million interim loan.
Rockdale now carries 241 megawatts of contracted capacity, counting an earlier lease with Advanced Micro Devices that started at 25 megawatts and has since been delivered. Chief Executive Jason Les said the two agreements together represent roughly $9.8 billion in long-term contracted revenue, all of it booked inside six months.
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Five Wall Street firms raised their price targets within hours. H.C. Wainwright moved to $40 from $25, Bernstein to $35 from $30, Citi to $32 from $28, Cantor Fitzgerald to $30 from $23 and Piper Sandler to $25 from $23. Several also pointed to a non-binding letter of intent covering the full gigawatt of capacity at Riot's Corsicana site in Texas.
Bernstein analysts now assign 84% of Riot's $14.7 billion target enterprise value to AI colocation, against 11% for Bitcoin mining and 5% for the company's coin holdings.
They expect colocation revenue near $900 million by 2030, up from roughly $600 million in their previous model, and see the stock reaching $35 within a year.
That repricing arrived despite weak operating numbers, since quarterly revenue rose 14% to $174.2 million while the company swung to a net loss of $237.2 million, or 68 cents per diluted share.
Mining brought in $113.7 million during the quarter, against $23.2 million from data centers. Riot shares still climbed more than 20% before Tuesday's opening bell in New York.
The agreement extends a pattern Anthropic set earlier this year, when it began leasing power directly from companies originally built to mine cryptocurrency, rather than renting capacity from cloud providers alone. On Jul. 6 the firm committed to a 20-year, $19 billion lease with TeraWulf for 401 megawatts at a former aluminum smelter in Hawesville, Kentucky.
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