Riot leases Corsicana campus to AI lab for 15 years, $28B

Bitcoin miner Riot Platforms announced the largest lease in its history: a 15-year deal for its entire Corsicana, Texas campus, covering 910 MW of critical IT capacity and about $28 billion over the initial term. Riot disclosed it on Nov. 4 in the Q3 results release filed with its 8-K.

Details

The tenant is described only as "a leading Frontier AI Lab"; Riot did not name it. Cointelegraph reports it is Anthropic, which the company has not confirmed. Average annual rent is about $1.8 billion including escalators, rising to roughly $54 billion if both five-year extensions are exercised.

It is a triple-net powered land lease: Riot supplies the 332-acre site, power infrastructure and powered pads, while the tenant installs and runs its own equipment. Capital cost is put at $6 million per IT MW, or $5.5 billion, and Riot expects to fund its share from existing liquidity without issuing equity. Delivery is phased: 400 MW in September 2027, 200 MW in January 2028 and 310 MW in July 2028, with rent on each phase starting within 60 days of delivery.

Together with its AMD contract and an earlier lease at Rockdale, Riot now has 1,151 MW and about $38 billion of data center revenue contracted. Cointelegraph says Riot shares rose more than 13% on the news, while Hut 8 fell more than 22% at one point the same day after Q3 revenue of $71.1 million (down 15% year over year) missed the $75.8 million analyst estimate.

What it means for the market

For miners, it is another step from mining toward leasing capacity to AI: Riot's CEO has said nearly all expected cash flow will come from long-term AI leases at full deployment. The same quarterly report also showed Bitcoin sales, which we covered separately. Whether this trims public miners' bitcoin hashrate depends on how sites are allocated. For the live BTC price, see the daily brief.