Riot Platforms has signed a $28 billion, 15-year agreement to host Anthropic's AI compute in Texas, and the number worth staring at is not the headline figure. It is the interest rate. Riot could end up paying Anthropic, its own tenant, 12% a year on billions in construction costs.
Per CoinDesk, the deal covers 910 megawatts at Riot's Corsicana campus, with capacity arriving in phases through July 2028. Riot supplies the land and electrical infrastructure. Anthropic installs and runs the computing equipment. Once everything is fully operational, Riot expects average annual rent of about $1.8 billion over the initial term.
The expensive part
Getting to that rent check costs roughly $5.5 billion, according to Riot's earnings presentation. About $1.8 billion of that is Riot's own site and electrical work. The bigger slice, up to $3.6 billion, reimburses Anthropic for its data center facilities. The reimbursements depend on actual eligible costs and come due after each phase is delivered and starts earning rent.
Here is the kicker. Anthropic recovers those eligible costs through rent deductions carrying 12% annual interest. Read that again. The Claude developer is the tenant in this arrangement and also a creditor charging its landlord double-digit rates. Twelve percent is expensive money, and Riot is the one paying it while also cutting the rent checks.
Where the cash comes from
Riot plans to borrow most of the build cost. Its financing illustration assumes lenders cover 80% to 90% of the project, leaving Riot to contribute roughly $500 million to $1.1 billion in cash. That financing process is set to launch in 2027, with the first capacity scheduled to begin earning rent in June 2027.
The bitcoin, meanwhile, has been funding the pivot. Riot has sold about $1.5 billion in BTC to support the data center expansion and repay a loan, and CoinDesk notes the company has sold most of its bitcoin to finance the move into data centers at all.
I keep coming back to how circular AI infrastructure money has become, and now that pattern sits on a bitcoin miner's balance sheet. Riot sold its bitcoin, is borrowing 80% to 90% of a $5.5 billion build, and agreed to pay its AI tenant 12% interest for the privilege of housing that tenant's machines. Maybe the $1.8 billion a year in rent covers everything and Riot's shareholders look brilliant by 2028. Or maybe a miner that dumped its BTC to become a leveraged landlord at double-digit rates is exactly the kind of trade that defines the top of an AI capex boom. Nobody knows how this plays out, but Riot has made its choice very clear.