From bitcoin to artificial intelligence: Riot leases its sheds to Anthropic

Riot Platforms has signed a twenty-year lease for 191 megawatts of computing capacity at its campus in Rockdale, Texas. The expected value is 9.1 billion dollars and the term runs to June 2048. Two five-year extension options could take the total to 16.1 billion. The tenant, unnamed in the company's statement, was identified by Bloomberg as Anthropic, the firm behind Claude.

The market reaction was immediate: Riot shares rose around 17 per cent during the session and roughly 25 per cent in after-hours trading. Other companies that began in cryptocurrency mining and are now pursuing the same conversion also gained ground, among them Iren, Applied Digital and TeraWulf.

An asset that counts for its power, not its bitcoin

The logic of the deal lies in what these groups actually own. To mine bitcoin they built sheds connected to the grid under supply contracts of hundreds of megawatts, along with cooling systems and connections that today take years to permit. That is precisely what is needed to house the graphics processors on which language models are trained and run. Mining computation, by contrast, pays less and less: the reward per block halves at regular intervals and margins keep thinning.

The capacity will not be available at once. Riot expects to reach 96 megawatts by December 2027 and to complete the full 191 megawatts by June 2028. To fund the first phase of construction the company secured 573 million dollars from Morgan Stanley, while final financing is still being arranged.

For Anthropic this is one more long-term commitment on computing capacity, at a moment when artificial intelligence labs are locking in power and physical space with contracts covering the next two decades. The open question is the time horizon: the commitments run for twenty years, while the revenue meant to sustain them depends on a market with less than four years of commercial history. The companies leasing out the sheds get paid either way, as long as the tenant stays solvent.