Riot Platforms Rockdale Data Center Campus, Rockdale, Texas

Riot Platforms, a bitcoin mining company, is building AI data center capacity at its Rockdale, Texas, campus, and in August 2026 signed a $9.1 billion lease there with Anthropic. Rockdale is a city of about 5,300 people in Milam County, 41 miles west of College Station. Its economy was built around an Alcoa aluminum smelter that wound down between 2008 and 2014, cutting hundreds of jobs and shrinking the tax base. Riot Platforms, then called Riot Blockchain, built a bitcoin mining operation on the old Alcoa site, using the power substations and lines Alcoa left behind. The facility began construction in 2019 and started running in 2020. Rockdale Mayor Ward Roddam has credited the miners with reviving the town, saying they have invested more than $1 billion and become among the largest taxpayers in Milam County and its school district. Asked about the industry's critics, Roddam said: "Are these the actions of people who don't care about rural Texas? No."

The Rockdale site is Riot's flagship, with 700 megawatts of developed capacity across seven buildings. The company says it has run bitcoin mining computers there around the clock using both air and immersion cooling. Greenpeace, which campaigns against bitcoin mining's energy use, has called Rockdale the most energy and carbon-intensive bitcoin mine in the U.S.

In January 2026, Riot bought the 200 acres under the Rockdale facility outright for $96 million, funded by selling about 1,080 bitcoin from its own holdings. The company signed AMD as its first data center tenant: an initial 25 megawatts of computing capacity with room to grow to 200 megawatts, under a 10-year lease Riot valued at up to $1 billion if all extension options are used. Permits filed with the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation describe a 40,000-square-foot addition at the site, called "Building G," with an estimated construction cost of $75 million.

In August 2026, Riot disclosed a far larger deal: a 20-year lease worth $9.1 billion, running through June 2048, to supply 191 megawatts of computing capacity to a company it described only as a "leading frontier AI lab." Bloomberg later identified the counterparty as the AI company Anthropic. Riot said it would deliver 96 megawatts by December 2027 and the full 191 megawatts by June 2028, and that two five-year extension options could raise the deal's value to $16.1 billion. Riot financed the early construction with a $573 million loan from Morgan Stanley. Chief executive Jason Les said the Anthropic and AMD leases together gave Riot about $9.8 billion in contracted data center revenue, all signed within six months.

On August 3, 2026, Governor Greg Abbott announced a moratorium on approving data centers until state regulators audit those seeking to connect to the Texas grid, including their tax breaks, power and water use and ownership.