TL;DR · 30-second read
The Short Version
Riot Platforms, a company best known for mining bitcoin, has rented out an entire site near Corsicana, Texas, to an artificial intelligence lab for 15 years. The deal is worth about $28 billion.
The site will supply 910 megawatts, about as much electricity as a sizable city uses. Riot provides the land and the power hookups. The lab brings its own computers.
The catch is that Riot gets paid only after the electricity is switched on, with the first section due in September 2027. Riot’s future now rests less on bitcoin and more on delivering power on time.
Riot Platforms announced on November 4, 2026, in its third-quarter earnings release filed with an 8-K, that it has signed a 15-year triple-net powered land lease with “a leading Frontier AI Lab” for its entire Corsicana, Texas campus. The lease covers 910 megawatts of critical IT capacity on a contiguous 332-acre parcel and is worth about $28 billion over the initial term, or roughly $1.8 billion in average annual rent. The same lab signed a lease at Riot’s Rockdale site earlier in 2026.
ET Datacenters reported several further terms. It named Anthropic as the first tenant. It said the capacity arrives in three phases: 400 MW in September 2027, 200 MW in January 2028 and 310 MW in July 2028. Rent starts within 60 days of each powered-pad delivery. Two five-year extension options could lift total contract value to $54 billion. Under the capital split, Riot funds about $2 million per megawatt and the tenant reimburses the remaining roughly $4 million once each phase is paying rent.
Executive Summary
Riot’s Corsicana deal is the largest lease in the company’s history. It brings Riot’s contracted data center portfolio to 1,151 megawatts and about $38 billion of long-term revenue across Corsicana, Rockdale and a separate AMD contract. Riot says it expects that portfolio to produce more than $2 billion of average annual net operating income at full deployment. For comparison, Riot reported total quarterly revenue of $181.4 million for the third quarter, of which $18.4 million came from data centers.
The structure matters as much as the size. Under a powered land lease, Riot delivers land, high- and medium-voltage power infrastructure and ready-to-connect “powered pads.” The tenant procures, owns and operates its own modular computing equipment and pays substantially all operating costs, including electricity. Riot puts total capital cost at about $6 million per IT megawatt, which CEO Jason Les described as about half the capital of a conventional Tier 3 build. Rent is owed on the full 910 MW whether or not the tenant uses it.
Because both rent and the tenant’s capital reimbursement are triggered by delivery, Riot’s cash flows from Corsicana now depend on getting power to the pads on schedule.
Riot Is Selling Energized Land, Not Data Halls
A conventional data center developer builds the whole facility: shell, cooling, backup power and the redundancy that earns a Tier 3 rating, an industry standard for uptime. Riot’s Corsicana lease skips most of that. Riot provides the land, the grid connection and the high- and medium-voltage equipment, which it continues to own and maintain. The tenant installs modular compute, meaning factory-built units of servers and supporting gear, directly on the pads. “Triple-net” means the tenant also bears substantially all operating costs, with power passed through at cost.
That division of labor explains the economics Riot is promoting. At about $6 million per IT megawatt, or roughly $5.5 billion in total, Riot’s build is far lighter than a full data center. Riot’s management says it also limits procurement, development and operating risk. That claim is plausible on the structure described, though Riot has not published the Tier 3 cost benchmark behind its “about half” comparison. The trade-off is that Riot captures landlord-style rent rather than the higher, riskier margins of operating compute. The product is, in effect, a guaranteed electrical connection at scale.
Why the Power-On Date Carries the Economics
The contract’s value is easy to state. $28 billion over 910 MW works out to about $30.8 million per contracted megawatt across the initial term. The $1.8 billion average annual rent works out to roughly $1.98 million per megawatt per year. That figure is almost exactly the $2 million per megawatt Riot says it will contribute toward site work and electrical infrastructure. Put differently, on gross rent and average-year terms, a single year of rent is roughly equal to Riot’s own capital stake. That stake totals about $1.8 billion across the campus.
The timing is the critical part. As reported, rent for each phase begins within 60 days of powered-pad delivery. The tenant’s reimbursement of the other roughly $4 million per megawatt, about $3.6 billion in total, is paid after each phase is delivered and generating rent. Both of Riot’s inflows are therefore gated by energization: getting high-voltage power physically to the pads. At average rent, each month the 400 MW first phase slips past September 2027 defers about $66 million of rent. Reimbursement of that phase’s roughly $1.6 billion tenant-funded share would be delayed alongside it. These are illustrative figures based on average rent; Riot has not disclosed the year-one rent schedule.
This is why the operational risk now sits with transformers, substations and grid timing rather than with finding a customer. The customer is signed, and rent is owed on full capacity regardless of utilization. What Riot must still do is deliver 400 MW, then 200 MW, then 310 MW of energized capacity across ten months in 2027 and 2028. Large-load grid connections and long-lead electrical equipment are where AI campus schedules commonly slip.
The Balance-Sheet Bridge Between Signing and Rent
Riot says it expects to fund its share from existing liquidity and does not currently anticipate issuing equity for announced projects. It ended the third quarter with $950.2 million in cash and bitcoin. It had raised no equity in 2026, having instead sold 20,264 bitcoin year-to-date for about $1.5 billion, primarily to fund data center development. Riot’s roughly $1.8 billion Corsicana share is larger than that quarter-end figure on its own. Construction will be spread over several phases and years, and Riot also has commitments at Rockdale and under the AMD contract.
According to the reported terms, the tenant’s reimbursements are expected to be financed with non-recourse project debt backed by the contracted rent. Non-recourse means lenders can claim the project’s cash flows but not Riot’s other assets. If comparable financing is unavailable, the tenant funds the reimbursements directly and recovers them through rent credits over the remaining term. That backstop protects Riot’s capital recovery, but it would reduce net rent received in later years. Lenders’ appetite will hinge on the lab’s credit and on the same delivery milestones that trigger rent.
From Bitcoin Miner to AI Landlord, With One Dominant Tenant
The scale of the shift is clear in Riot’s own numbers. Corsicana’s average annual rent alone is roughly 2.5 times Riot’s third-quarter revenue on an annualized basis. Contracted revenue of about $38 billion now dwarfs the data center segment’s current $18.4 million a quarter. Because the same frontier lab holds both the Corsicana and Rockdale leases, at least $28 billion of the $38 billion, about three-quarters, depends on a single counterparty.
Concentration is common in hyperscale leasing, where the largest cloud and AI buyers sign the biggest contracts. It means Riot’s valuation increasingly tracks one tenant’s credit and the pace of AI capital spending more than bitcoin’s price. The winners in this structure are owners of land with large, deliverable grid connections. Riot’s deal shows that such sites can command multi-decade contracts without the owner building or running the compute. The open question is execution.
Background
Riot Platforms, headquartered in Castle Rock, Colorado, built its business as one of the larger US bitcoin miners. It operates facilities in central Texas, including Rockdale and Corsicana, and in Kentucky, along with engineering and fabrication operations in Denver and Houston. Bitcoin mining requires large amounts of cheap, reliable electricity, which has left miners holding grid connections and land that AI developers now want for power-hungry data centers.
Through 2026, Riot has repositioned itself as a developer of large-scale data centers. It signed an AMD contract and a lease at Rockdale with the same frontier AI lab before the Corsicana deal. To fund the shift, it sold about $1.5 billion of bitcoin year-to-date rather than issuing new shares. Source: Riot Platforms leases 910 MW Texas data center for US$28 billion (ET Datacenters): Riot’s 15-year lease of its entire Corsicana campus to a frontier AI lab, with phasing and capital terms. Primary sources: Riot Platforms Form 10-Q for the quarter ended September 30, 2026 (filed November 4, 2026); Riot Platforms Form 8-K filed November 4, 2026; Exhibit 99.1: Riot Platforms Reports Third Quarter 2026 Financial Results and Strategic Highlights; Exhibit 99.2: Riot Platforms Q3 2026 Earnings Deck.Sources