Riot Platforms signs 191 MW Rockdale data-center agreement

Agreement and tenant identity

Riot Platforms disclosed on August 10 a 20-year lease and services agreement for 191 MW of critical IT capacity at its Rockdale, Texas, campus. The build-to-suit Tier 3 data center is scheduled to deliver 96 MW in December 2027 and the full 191 MW in June 2028, according to Riot’s second-quarter results.

Riot described the customer as a leading frontier-AI laboratory without naming it. Bloomberg, in a report republished by Yahoo Finance on August 11, identified the tenant as Anthropic PBC. Anthropic had not publicly confirmed the agreement in the material cited in the dossier.

Revenue projections and financing

Riot estimates the agreement will generate approximately $9.1 billion of total revenue through June 2048. That figure is a cumulative company projection over the initial term, with a simple annual average of about $455 million before accounting for the delivery ramp or an undisclosed payment schedule.

The company projects cumulative net operating income of $7.3 billion to $8.2 billion during the initial term, equal to a simple annual average of $365 million to $411 million. Two tenant-controlled five-year extensions could raise potential cumulative revenue to approximately $16.1 billion, Riot said.

Morgan Stanley is providing a $573 million interim financing facility for initial development costs while Riot finalizes an investment-grade credit backstop. Riot has not disclosed the project’s total construction cost, its equity contribution, or the final backstop structure.

Rockdale capacity and execution risk

Riot reports 700 MW of developed power capacity at Rockdale, a campus whose existing power infrastructure, land and industrial operations can support data-center development. The company says it has now contracted 241 MW of critical IT capacity there, including a separate 50 MW AMD lease documented in a January SEC filing.

The 191 MW agreement covers critical IT load. Total grid demand will be higher because cooling, power conversion and auxiliary systems consume electricity; the final demand depends on facility efficiency and operating patterns. Public disclosures do not identify the accelerators, servers, networking equipment or storage for the project, or which company will own and operate them.

The agreement would add long-duration data-center revenue to a business still dominated by bitcoin mining. Riot reported $174.2 million in second-quarter 2026 revenue, including $23.2 million from data centers, while bitcoin-mining revenue fell to $113.7 million from $140.9 million a year earlier.

Anthropic has also secured a 20-year lease for about 401 MW of critical IT load at TeraWulf’s Kentucky campus, with projected initial-term revenue of about $19 billion, according to TeraWulf’s July 6 SEC filing. The two transactions show frontier-AI developers securing hundreds of megawatts from specialized infrastructure owners.

Revenue from the Rockdale agreement remains dependent on construction, commissioning and tenant performance. Riot has not disclosed rent escalation, termination rights, guarantees, performance remedies, or conditions for revenue to begin.