Riot Platforms surges 17% on $9.1B Anthropic data center co-location lease

Published Aug 11, 01:05 PM UTC

Riot Platforms (RIOT) shares surged 17% to $22.64 after disclosing a landmark 20-year, 191-megawatt data center co-location lease with Anthropic, a leading frontier AI lab, at its Rockdale, Texas campus. The deal is expected to generate approximately $9.1 billion in contracted revenue through June 2048, with two five-year extension options potentially raising the total value to $16.1 billion. Combined with an existing AMD lease, Riot now controls 241 MW of contracted capacity and roughly $9.8 billion in long-term revenue, marking its pivot from a pure Bitcoin miner to an AI infrastructure developer. Delivery is staged: 96 MW by December 2027 and full 191 MW by June 2028, with Morgan Stanley providing $573 million in interim financing. Despite a quarterly net loss of $237.2 million, analysts reacted positively, with Bernstein raising its price target to $35 and Citi to $32. Peers IREN and Applied Digital gained only 2%, indicating the rally is single-name driven.