Analyst predicts 55% rally for Riot Platforms stock on $9B Anthropic deal

Riot Platforms just pulled off the kind of pivot that makes MBA professors weep with joy. The Bitcoin mining company signed a 20-year deal to deliver 191 megawatts of data center capacity to Anthropic, the AI company behind the Claude family of models, at its Rockdale, Texas facility. The expected revenue: $9.1B over the initial term, with two five-year extension options that could push the total haul to roughly $16.1B.

At least one analyst is projecting a 55% upside for RIOT shares on the back of the deal, which represents one of the largest infrastructure commitments a Bitcoin miner has ever secured from an AI company.

From mining rigs to AI racks

The contract, confirmed through Bloomberg reporting, will see Riot repurpose its existing Rockdale infrastructure to serve Anthropic’s growing appetite for compute power. This isn’t Riot’s first foray into high-performance computing, either. The company already has an AMD AI chip hosting agreement at the same facility with a potential capacity of up to 200 MW.

RIOT shares surged between 21% and 25% in premarket trading when the news broke. That’s on top of a roughly 60% gain the stock had already logged year-to-date before the announcement.

Why Anthropic needs the power

Anthropic has been on a tear. The company, founded by former OpenAI researchers Dario and Daniela Amodei, has been racing to scale its Claude models and compete head-to-head with OpenAI’s GPT series and Google’s Gemini. The 191 MW that Riot is providing is roughly enough to power a small city, or in AI terms, a meaningful chunk of a large-scale training cluster.

The two five-year extension options baked into the contract suggest both parties expect demand for AI compute to persist well into the 2050s.

The broader miner-to-AI pipeline

Riot isn’t the only Bitcoin miner eyeing the AI opportunity. The entire publicly traded mining sector has been exploring ways to monetize existing infrastructure for high-performance computing workloads. The thesis is simple: Bitcoin mining revenue fluctuates with Bitcoin’s price and the halving cycle, which cuts miner rewards roughly every four years. AI hosting contracts, by contrast, offer predictable, long-duration revenue streams that Wall Street can model with a lot more confidence.

The 55% upside projection from analysts reflects this re-rating potential. If Riot can demonstrate that its infrastructure has dual-use value, serving both Bitcoin mining and AI compute, it could command a valuation multiple closer to a data center REIT than a crypto miner.

For Riot specifically, the Rockdale facility has been a cornerstone of its operations for years. Adding the Anthropic contract alongside the existing AMD hosting agreement essentially turns Rockdale into a diversified compute campus rather than a single-purpose mining farm.

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