Riot Stock Jumps 25% After Hours on $9.1B AI Compute Deal With Anthropic

A Bitcoin Miner Lands One of AI’s Biggest Contracts

Riot Platforms, the world’s fourth-largest Bitcoin mining company, has signed a $9.1 billion agreement to supply computing capacity to Anthropic, the AI firm behind the Claude models. The deal, confirmed Monday after a Bloomberg report, is one of the largest contracts ever struck between an AI lab and a crypto miner.

The market reaction was immediate. Riot shares closed Monday down 5.46%, then surged 25.26% in after-hours trading to $24.30 once the partner’s identity emerged, according to The Block.

Inside the $9.1 Billion Agreement

The contract runs for 20 years, through June 2048, and covers 191 megawatts of IT capacity at Riot’s Rockdale campus in Texas. Two five-year extensions could raise the total value to $16.1 billion.

Delivery is phased. The first 96 megawatts are due online in December 2027, with the full 191 megawatts scheduled for June 2028.

To fund the buildout, Riot secured a $573 million interim facility from Morgan Stanley. CEO Jason Les said the company has now executed leases totaling 241 megawatts of capacity in just over six months.

A Sharp Turn From a Rough Quarter

The announcement landed hours after Riot posted mixed second-quarter results. Revenue rose 14% year over year to $174.2 million, with $113.7 million from Bitcoin mining and $23.2 million from its young data center arm, but the company still booked a net loss of $237.2 million.

That contrast explains the stock’s whipsaw. Investors sold the earnings, then bought the pivot. A contracted, two-decade revenue stream from one of AI’s best-funded labs reads very differently from the volatile economics of mining, a story worth following alongside the latest crypto news as more miners report earnings this week.

Why AI Companies Want Bitcoin Miners’ Power

The logic behind these deals is simple: AI’s biggest bottleneck is not chips; it is electricity and the industrial sites wired to deliver it. Bitcoin miners spent a decade securing exactly those assets.

A large mining campus already has high-voltage grid connections, power purchase agreements, cooling infrastructure and permitted land. Converting that capacity to host AI servers can take a fraction of the time needed to build a data center from scratch. For an AI lab racing to train and serve models, buying a miner’s ready-made capacity is often the fastest route to new compute.

Bernstein analysts made the point in July, noting that partnerships between AI companies and Bitcoin miners are necessary to address the power crunch constraining AI data centers, as reported by Cointelegraph.

A Pattern Forming Across the Mining Industry

Riot is not Anthropic’s first miner. On July 6, the AI firm signed a $19 billion, 20-year data center lease with TeraWulf, meaning it has now committed roughly $28 billion to former or current Bitcoin mining sites in just a few weeks.

The wider industry is moving the same way. Bitdeer, CleanSpark, MARA Holdings, Core Scientific, Hut 8 and IREN have all pushed into AI and high-performance computing, reshaping how these firms earn revenue.

For miners, the appeal is stability. Mining income swings with the Bitcoin price and rises in network difficulty, while AI hosting contracts pay fixed, long-term fees regardless of market conditions.

What the Deal Could Mean for Riot’s Mining Business

Riot says it is not abandoning Bitcoin. The company produced 1,587 BTC in the second quarter and holds more than $1.2 billion in liquid assets, including 11,380 BTC and $548.9 million in cash.

Still, the balance may keep shifting. If AI hosting proves more profitable per megawatt than mining, Riot could allocate future capacity growth toward compute clients rather than mining rigs. The mining fleet could increasingly act as a flexible baseload, absorbing power when AI demand is low and giving way when it is high.

For everyday investors, miner stocks have become an indirect way to hold exposure to both AI and crypto in one instrument, though anyone who would rather own the asset itself can simply buy crypto directly.

The Power Race Is Rewriting Crypto’s Industrial Layer

The bigger story is what deals like this says about where value sits in the digital economy. Two years ago, Bitcoin miners were judged almost entirely on hashrate and coin production. Today, their most prized asset is grid access, and the buyers are AI labs with far deeper pockets than any mining rival.

That shift cuts both ways. Long-term AI contracts could give the mining sector its first genuinely predictable revenue base, strengthening companies that survived brutal halving cycles. But every megawatt leased to an AI lab is a megawatt no longer securing the Bitcoin network, and a sustained migration of industrial power away from mining raises open questions about what that could mean for network security over the next decade.

Riot’s 25% after-hours jump suggests the market has picked its side. Power, not hash power, is the asset being repriced.