Riot Platforms has signed a 20-year agreement to supply 191 megawatts of power capacity from its Rockdale, Texas campus to a “leading frontier AI” company, with Anthropic identified as the customer in a report citing people familiar with the arrangement. The contract is valued at roughly $9 billion over its initial term and would turn part of one of Bitcoin mining’s best-known U.S. sites into infrastructure for artificial intelligence computing.
Riot did not name Anthropic in its announcement, and neither company commented publicly in the report. Yet the scale and duration disclosed by Riot place the agreement among the largest reported examples of a Bitcoin miner monetizing its power assets through an AI customer rather than through Bitcoin production alone.
The Rockdale deal gives Anthropic access to a substantial block of electricity capacity through June 2048. Riot said the agreement covers exactly 191 megawatts, an amount comparable to the continuous electricity demand of roughly 143,000 average U.S. households, based on the household-power comparison included in the reported deal materials.
Riot expects the contract to generate about $9.1 billion in revenue during the original 20-year period. The customer also holds two five-year extension options, which could increase total revenue beyond $16.1 billion if both are exercised, according to the figures cited in the report.
Rockdale becomes a long-term AI infrastructure site
The agreement extends the use of Rockdale beyond its original role as a major Bitcoin mining campus. Riot has historically operated large fleets of specialized mining machines at the Texas location, whose economics depend heavily on Bitcoin’s price, the network’s mining difficulty, power costs and machine efficiency.
A long-dated capacity agreement changes that revenue profile. Rather than relying solely on the variable returns from mining Bitcoin, Riot would receive contracted payments from a large computing customer for access to power and site infrastructure. That structure can give a miner more predictable cash flow, though it also commits part of its available energy capacity to a different business line for decades.
Riot Chief Executive Officer Jason Les has described long-term hosting arrangements as a source of financial reliability for the company. The company reported a net loss of $237.2 million in the second quarter, despite revenue rising 14% to $174.2 million. The contrast underscores why contracted infrastructure income has become increasingly attractive to miners that have faced volatile mining margins and substantial capital requirements.
The site’s conversion does not automatically mean that Riot will remove operating Bitcoin miners or sharply reduce its hash rate in the near term. The disclosed agreement concerns power capacity and a data-center arrangement, while the timing and physical buildout of AI equipment have not been detailed in the supplied information. Any impact on Riot’s mining fleet would depend on how the company allocates power, buildings and equipment as the project develops.
Anthropic adds another major Texas capacity agreement
The reported Riot agreement follows Anthropic’s July 6 deal with TeraWulf, another Bitcoin miner pursuing high-performance computing and AI infrastructure. That 20-year lease was valued at $19 billion and involved 401 megawatts at a separate computing campus.
Taken together, the two arrangements would give Anthropic commitments tied to 592 megawatts of capacity from companies historically associated with Bitcoin mining. The demand reflects a bottleneck confronting AI developers: advanced model training and inference require dense, power-intensive data centers, while new grid connections and purpose-built facilities can take years to develop.
Bitcoin miners possess assets that AI companies need, including large power interconnections, land, cooling systems and experience operating energy-intensive facilities. In Texas, these advantages can be particularly valuable because major industrial sites may already have access to electricity infrastructure that would be difficult for a new data-center developer to secure from scratch.
Bernstein wrote in a July 23 report that partnerships between AI companies and Bitcoin miners are becoming necessary as electricity constraints limit the pace of AI data-center expansion. Riot’s deal offers a concrete example of that argument: a mining operator is selling long-term capacity from an established campus to an AI developer seeking power at scale.
Mining companies seek revenue beyond Bitcoin production
Riot joins a growing group of publicly traded miners that have been pursuing AI and high-performance computing opportunities. Bitdeer, CleanSpark, MARA Holdings, Core Scientific, Hut 8 and IREN have also sought to use their energy assets, data-center sites or operating expertise to serve customers beyond Bitcoin mining.
The strategies differ. Some companies are building or leasing data-center space, while others are marketing powered land or converting existing infrastructure. The common objective is to reduce exposure to Bitcoin mining’s cyclical economics without abandoning mining entirely.
Riot’s financial disclosures illustrate the capital demands behind that pivot. The company sold 3,778 Bitcoin for approximately $289.5 million during the first quarter, according to the figures included in the supplied material, using proceeds to help fund development costs. Building AI-ready capacity can require major spending on electrical systems, cooling, networking and server halls before a customer’s computing equipment is installed.
Riot shares fell 5.4% on Monday before rising more than 21% in overnight trading, according to Yahoo Finance data cited in the report. The stock was up more than 53% year to date. CompaniesMarketCap ranked Riot as the fourth-largest Bitcoin mining company by market capitalization, at $7.33 billion.
For Riot, the Anthropic contract places a measurable value on infrastructure that was previously assessed mainly through mining output. The company is now betting that the same access to electricity that made Rockdale valuable for Bitcoin can generate larger and steadier returns from the race to build AI computing capacity.
As Bitcoin miners pivot into AI infrastructure, explore how crypto mining fundamentals shape this evolving power-hungry landscape.
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