Riot Platforms signs a 191MW data centre lease reported to be with Anthropic

Bitcoin miner-turned-data-centre developer Riot Platforms disclosed, in its second-quarter results filed with the SEC, a 20-year Data Center Lease and Services Agreement for 191MW of critical IT capacity at its Rockdale, Texas campus. The filing did not name the tenant, identifying it only as “one of the world’s leading frontier AI labs.” Bloomberg subsequently reported, citing people familiar with the matter, that the customer was Anthropic; neither Riot nor Anthropic confirmed this when contacted.

The lease terms, as set out in Riot’s own filing, were firm: an initial 20-year term running through June 2048, expected to generate approximately $9.1 billion in contract revenue, with two five-year extension options that could lift the total potential value to around $16.1 billion if both are exercised. Riot said an initial 96MW of the capacity was expected online by December 2027, with the full 191MW deployed by June 2028, and that a $573 million interim financing facility from Morgan Stanley would fund initial development while a longer-term, investment-grade credit backstop was finalised. The Rockdale lease was Riot’s second at the campus, following a smaller agreement with AMD announced in January 2026, bringing the company’s total contracted capacity there to 241MW.

The deal extended a run of infrastructure agreements Anthropic had struck through 2026 with providers including CoreWeave, Google, Amazon and SpaceX, continuing a pattern of diversifying compute sources rather than relying on any single supplier. It also marked a further step in bitcoin miners repurposing power-dense sites for AI data centres, with Riot’s stock rising sharply on the news even before the tenant’s identity was independently confirmed — underscoring how much of the deal’s market impact rested on an identification the company itself had not made.