Riot Platforms told investors two things last week. One of them moved the stock 20 percent before the market opened. The other sat in the same earnings release, and it explains why the first one mattered so much: mining a single Bitcoin now costs Riot about 49,912 dollars.
Mining one coin costs Riot almost 50,000 dollars
Bitcoin mining brought in 113.7 million dollars for the quarter, and Riot still posted a net loss of 237.2 million. It produced 1,587 coins at a cost that has crept close to 50,000 dollars each before depreciation, against a Bitcoin price hovering in the low 60,000s. The margin is there on paper. It is thin, and it rides entirely on where Bitcoin trades.
The number that got the applause was 9.1 billion. That is the base value of a 20-year lease Riot signed to rent 191 megawatts of power at its Rockdale, Texas site to Anthropic, the artificial intelligence lab behind the Claude models. Two five-year extensions could carry the total to 16.1 billion dollars. Riot expects the deal to throw off between 7.3 and 8.2 billion dollars in cumulative net operating income across the base term. That rent does not depend on the Bitcoin price. That is the whole point of the trade.
One AI lease equals a year of the mining fleet
Spread the 9.1 billion dollars evenly across 20 years and the Anthropic contract averages roughly 455 million dollars a year. Riot's Bitcoin mining revenue for the second quarter, 113.7 million, annualizes to almost exactly the same figure. So a single lease covering about 11 percent of Riot's 1.7 gigawatts of Texas capacity is set to generate what the entire mining operation grossed over the past year, locked in for two decades, indifferent to what Bitcoin does.
| Comparison | Bitcoin mining, Q2 2026 | Anthropic AI lease |
|---|---|---|
| Reported value | 113.7 million for the quarter | 9.1 billion over 20 years |
| Average per year | about 455 million (annualized) | about 455 million |
| Revenue driver | Bitcoin's spot price and difficulty | fixed rent, price independent |
| Margin signal | 49,912 to mine one coin | 7.3 to 8.2 billion expected net operating income |
| Status | ongoing, difficulty sensitive | 96 MW live December 2027, full by June 2028 |
This is not Riot's first tenant. It signed a 25-megawatt deal with AMD in January, and chief executive Jason Les now counts 241 megawatts of leased capacity worth about 9.8 billion dollars in long-term contracted revenue. The AMD arrangement was a pilot. The Anthropic one is the business changing shape.
Renting the power, not selling the coins
Riot is not alone in the pivot. Bitcoin miners have been redirecting power toward AI tenants for months, and several have been selling coins to fund it. BitFuFu spent 357 Bitcoin in July while mining only 112, the kind of gap that shows how tight pure mining economics have become. Even the treasury holders are trimming: Strategy sold Bitcoin at a loss to keep a dividend funded.
Riot still holds 11,380 Bitcoin, with 5,821 pledged as collateral, so the company has not abandoned the asset. It has decided the reliable money sits in the power itself, not in the coins that power produces. The catch for investors is timing. None of the Anthropic revenue arrives until the first 96 megawatts come online in December 2027, and the full 191 does not land until the middle of 2028. Until then, Riot stays a miner carrying a 50,000-dollar cost per coin, waiting on a contract it has already signed.
