Anthropic has agreed to pay Riot Platforms $9.1 billion over 20 years for computing capacity at the miner’s Rockdale, Texas campus, according to people familiar with the matter who spoke to Bloomberg on Monday.
Riot’s stock jumped 24% in after-hours trading following the report, a sharp reversal after shares had already closed the regular session down more than 5%.
The Deal and the Market Reaction
Riot disclosed the agreement itself earlier Monday, describing a 20-year contract to supply 191 megawatts of capacity, enough to power roughly 143,000 homes at any given moment, to an unnamed “leading frontier AI” company.
Bloomberg’s sources, who asked not to be identified because the information is private, said that the company is Anthropic. Neither Riot nor Anthropic has confirmed the identity publicly.
The stock swing was dramatic even by Riot’s volatile standards. Shares closed regular trading at $19.40, down $1.12, before climbing to $24.13 in the after-hours session, a gain of $4.73 from the close. That put the after-hours price well above Monday’s intraday range of $19.13 to $20.46 and closer to the stock’s 52-week high of $30.32.
Volume topped 17.5 million shares against a daily average near 16.8 million, and Riot’s market cap stood at roughly $7.3 billion heading into the move.
The company’s latest earnings report also landed Monday, adding another variable for traders parsing the after-hours action. Total revenue went up 14% year-over-year to $174 million, while there was a GAAP net loss of $237 million, translating to $0.68 per diluted share.
Per the report, Riot mined 1,587 BTC in the quarter, each costing $49,912 to produce, bringing its holdings to 11,380 BTC valued at about $728 million at current rates.
Miners Have Been Funding AI Expansion With Bitcoin Sales
Riot’s move into AI hosting builds on a pattern that has been building for over a year. The company sold 3,778 BTC in the first quarter of 2026 alone, worth about $289.5 million, while continuing to mine and expand its high-performance computing footprint.
That selling has continued since. In early August, on-chain trackers flagged a 381 BTC deposit from Riot to an exchange, a move typically read as a precursor to a sale.
Riot isn’t alone. Analyst Shanaka Anslem Perera wrote in July that public miners, including MARA, CleanSpark, Cango, Core Scientific, and Bitdeer, sold more than 32,000 BTC combined in the first quarter and redirected that capital toward AI infrastructure contracts worth an estimated $70 billion across the industry.
Mining Bitcoin cost roughly $80,000 per unit for much of the year, well above the asset’s price, while AI hosting contracts offered several times that return. “They did what any business would,” Perera wrote.
The exodus briefly rattled Bitcoin’s network, pushing hash rate down about 4% and breaking a five-year streak of growth, before difficulty adjustments restored profitability for the miners who stayed, and the network kept producing blocks on schedule.
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