Riot Platforms closed Monday's regular session down 5.46%. A few hours later, the same stock surged 25.26% in after-hours trading, hitting $24.30. What happened in between was the announcement of a 20-year, $9.1 billion data center lease. Riot didn't name the counterparty—Bloomberg did: it's Anthropic, the company behind Claude.
The deal isn't about bitcoin at all. It centers on 191 megawatts (MW) of IT capacity at Riot's Rockdale, Texas campus. The agreement runs through June 2048, with two additional 5-year renewal options that, if all exercised, could push the total value as high as $16.1 billion. Capacity will roll out in two phases: an initial 96 MW comes online by December 2027, with the remaining tranche not filling out to the full 191 MW until June 2028. To bridge the funding gap in between, Riot secured a $573 million bridge loan from Morgan Stanley, while separately pursuing investment-grade credit guarantees.
This isn't Riot's first pivot. Back in January, the company had already inked a partnership deal with AMD. CEO Jason Les tied the two announcements together: over roughly the past six months, Riot has signed data center leases totaling 241 MW, corresponding to about $9.8 billion in long-term contracted revenue from two major players in the AI industry. He pointed to three advantages Riot brings to the table—grid-approved power capacity at gigawatt scale, an in-house data center development team, and the ability to build custom infrastructure for high-load demands like high-performance computing. Strip away the corporate phrasing, and it all boils down to one thing: what mining companies have been stockpiling isn't hashrate—it's power.
The contrast between the earnings and the mega-deal, announced on the same day, is stark. Q2 total revenue came in at $174.2 million, up 14% from $153 million a year earlier, with the data center segment contributing $23.2 million—driven by the first 25 MW of capacity already delivered to AMD. Core bitcoin mining revenue was $113.7 million, engineering revenue reached $37.3 million, and bitcoin production totaled 1,587 coins. At quarter's end, the company held 11,380 bitcoin and $548.9 million in cash, with total current assets exceeding $1.2 billion.
But the bottom line flipped. Riot posted a net loss of $237.2 million for the quarter, or $0.68 per share, versus a net profit of $219.5 million, or $0.58 per share, in the same period last year—a swing from profit to loss. The market's verdict was clear: investors chose to look past the loss and focus on the contract instead. That 25% after-hours pop already says it all.
