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1. What does the Riot Anthropic deal involve?
Riot Platforms, a bitcoin miner converting its Texas power sites into artificial intelligence campuses, has signed a 15-year, $28 billion agreement to host Anthropic, the developer of the Claude AI model. In the Riot Anthropic deal, disclosed with its quarterly results on November 4, Anthropic can recover eligible construction costs through rent deductions that carry 12% annual interest.
The arrangement covers 910 megawatts of capacity at Riot's Corsicana campus in Texas, delivered in phases through July 2028. Riot is to supply the land and the electrical infrastructure, while Anthropic installs and operates the computing equipment. Once the campus is fully operating, average annual rent is expected to reach about $1.8 billion over the 15-year initial term.
The headline risk is in the financing mechanics. Riot could end up paying interest to its own tenant on billions of dollars of construction spending, a feature that sets the contract apart from a conventional lease in which the landlord alone carries its build costs.
2. How much will the Corsicana project cost?
Riot's earnings presentation puts the total cost of the project at roughly $5.5 billion. About $1.8 billion of that covers Riot's own work on the site and its electrical systems. Up to $3.6 billion is set aside to reimburse Anthropic for the datacenter facilities it builds on the campus.
The reimbursement amount is a ceiling, not a fixed price. It depends on the eligible costs Anthropic actually incurs, and the payments fall due only after each phase of the campus has been delivered and has begun earning rent. That timing links the largest outlay to the point at which revenue starts to arrive, which reduces the period in which Riot is paying out before it collects.
3. How is Riot paying for the build?
Riot plans to fund most of the construction with borrowed money. Its financing illustration assumes lenders would provide 80% to 90% of the cost, leaving Riot to contribute between about $500 million and $1.1 billion in cash. The financing process is scheduled to start in 2027.
Project-level debt of that kind is common in infrastructure, where a long contract with a creditworthy tenant gives lenders predictable revenue to lend against. A 15-year agreement with an average annual rent of about $1.8 billion is the type of cash flow that debt investors assess when sizing a loan.
Riot does not currently expect to issue new shares to pay for its announced projects. That detail is relevant to shareholders, since equity issuance is the other main way a company can raise money for a build of this size, and it would dilute existing owners.
4. Why could Riot pay Anthropic 12% interest?
The 12% interest arises from a rent-deduction mechanism described in Riot's quarterly filing. Anthropic can recover eligible module costs by deducting them from future rent, and those deductions carry interest at 12% a year. In effect, Anthropic finances part of the construction and is repaid through reduced rent payments, with a return on the money it advanced.
The headline wording is conditional for a reason. The interest applies only if Anthropic uses the mechanism for eligible costs, and the amount depends on how much it spends and when deductions are taken. The filing does not, in the details available, state how much rent Riot would actually collect after deductions.
Riot was asked several questions about the structure: how much rent it would collect once deductions are applied, whether it could repay the reimbursement early, and what interest rate it is targeting for the project debt. Its answers were not available. Those three points will largely determine whether a 12% charge is expensive relative to the bank financing Riot hopes to arrange, which is why they matter for judging the economics of the contract.
A comparison helps explain the interest. Lenders to a data center project would price their loans according to the risk of the borrower and the contract, and an interest rate above what project debt costs would make Anthropic's advance a relatively costly source of funds for Riot. If Riot could repay the reimbursement early, it could replace that funding with cheaper debt, which is the reason the early-repayment question is significant.
5. How much bitcoin has Riot sold to fund the move?
The shift into data centers has come at the expense of Riot's bitcoin holdings. In the first nine months of 2026, the company sold 20,264 bitcoin (BTC) for about $1.5 billion. The proceeds mainly paid for data center development and repaid a $200 million loan from Coinbase.
At the end of September, Riot held only 2,418 BTC. The company says it expects to keep selling substantially all of the bitcoin it newly mines. That marks a departure from the long-standing strategy among public miners of retaining mined coins as a treasury asset, and it shows how far Riot has moved toward treating mining as a source of cash for its infrastructure business.
For investors who bought Riot partly for exposure to the price of bitcoin, the change is meaningful. The company's value now depends more on its ability to build and lease out power-rich sites than on the size of its bitcoin stack.
6. Why are bitcoin miners moving into AI data centers?
Bitcoin miners control something AI developers want: large, grid-connected power supplies and sites already designed to run dense computing equipment around the clock. Training and running AI models requires enormous amounts of electricity, and securing megawatts of capacity has become a bottleneck for the companies building those systems.
For miners, long-term hosting contracts offer revenue that does not swing with the bitcoin price or with mining difficulty. A 15-year agreement with a single large tenant replaces an income stream tied to a volatile asset with one set by contract, which is the attraction behind the Corsicana deal.
The trade-off is a heavier capital commitment. Building to the standards of an AI facility costs far more than a mining hall, which is why Riot expects to rely on lenders for most of the money, and why the terms of the Anthropic reimbursement matter to its balance sheet.
7. What does a hosting lease mean for a miner's business model?
A traditional bitcoin mining company earns revenue by validating transactions and collecting newly issued coins and fees, so its income moves with the bitcoin price and with the network's overall computing power. A hosting landlord instead earns rent for providing space and power, and its income is set by the terms of a contract signed years in advance.
That difference changes how the business is assessed. Analysts judging a miner focus on hash rate, energy cost per coin and the bitcoin held on the balance sheet. For a landlord, the questions are the length and quality of the lease, the credit strength of the tenant and the cost of the debt used to build the property. The Corsicana agreement pushes Riot toward the second set of measures.
In this structure the split of responsibilities is clear. Riot provides land and electrical infrastructure, the physical foundations that take years to secure and connect to the grid. Anthropic supplies and runs the computing equipment, which is the part of the stack closest to its AI products. Each party therefore carries the assets it is best placed to manage.
The reimbursement and interest terms are the unusual element. They give the tenant a financial stake in the construction itself, and they leave Riot exposed to a cost that rises with the amount Anthropic spends on eligible facilities, up to the $3.6 billion cap described in the presentation.
8. What does 910 megawatts of capacity mean in practice?
A megawatt is a unit of electrical power, and data center capacity is usually quoted in megawatts because power availability, not floor space, is the main limit on how much computing equipment a site can run. A commitment of 910 megawatts therefore describes the maximum electrical load the Corsicana campus is designed to supply to Anthropic's equipment.
Capacity of that scale takes years to assemble. It requires land, a connection to the transmission grid, substations and cooling and backup systems, each of which has its own lead times. This is the reason developers with existing power access, such as bitcoin miners, have drawn interest from AI companies that would otherwise wait in long queues for new connections.
The phased delivery through July 2028 reflects that reality. Capacity is brought online in stages, with rent beginning on each stage as it is delivered, and the first stage due in June 2027. The staggered schedule also spreads the construction outlay, and the reimbursements to Anthropic, over several periods instead of concentrating them at a single date.
Average annual rent of about $1.8 billion, as Riot projects it, applies once the whole campus is running. Before that point, rent would be lower, because only the phases already delivered would be earning it.
9. What happens next?
The first capacity at Corsicana is due in June 2027, when it can begin earning rent. Further phases are scheduled to arrive through July 2028, and each one triggers reimbursement payments to Anthropic once it is delivered and generating rent.
Riot plans to start its financing process in 2027. The terms it secures, together with answers on net rent after deductions and on early repayment of the reimbursement, will show how much of the $28 billion in contracted rent the company can retain after interest and debt service.
Until then, the figures rest on Riot's own presentation and filing, including its financing illustration, which are projections and depend on construction proceeding on schedule and on actual eligible costs.