Industry AI Minute Newsroom 2026-08-11

A bitcoin miner just signed the biggest lease of its life — 20 years, 191 megawatts, and Anthropic on the other side of it

Riot Platforms disclosed to the SEC on 10 August that it had signed a 20-year lease at its Rockdale, Texas campus with a tenant it described only as a leading frontier AI lab: 191 megawatts of critical IT capacity, and roughly $9.1 billion of base contract revenue through June 2048. Two five-year extension options could take the total to about $16.1 billion. Bloomberg identified the tenant as Anthropic, citing people familiar with the matter; neither company has confirmed it on the record. The first 96 megawatts are due to come online in December 2027 and the full 191 by June 2028, using an interconnection Rockdale has already had approved. Riot shares rose about 17% on the news, and chief executive Jason Les said on Monday's earnings call that the company had also signed a letter of intent with an unnamed tenant for its one-gigawatt site at Corsicana.

Why it mattersThe detail that carries the story is the grid connection, not the money. Texas froze new large-load interconnection requests a week ago, and the major AI companies have since agreed to the governor's terms to get back into the queue — which makes capacity that is already approved far more valuable than capacity you still have to apply for. Riot spent years building a bitcoin mine and, without planning it, ended up owning exactly the scarce thing. Expect more deals shaped like this one: in 2026 the fastest route to a data centre is often not to build one, but to lease from a miner that already has the power.

✓ Verified · 3 sources

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A bitcoin miner just signed the biggest lease of its life — 20 years, 191 megawatts, and Anthropic on the other side of it

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