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 announcem...