Riot Platforms announced this morning that it leased its entire campus in Corsicana, Texas, for 15 years. The lease covers 910 megawatts and is worth about $28 billion over the term. That works out to roughly $1.8 billion a year in rent. If the tenant uses both five-year extensions, the total climbs to close to $54 billion.
Riot calls the tenant a frontier AI lab. It’s the same lab that leased Riot’s Rockdale site in August. Bloomberg reported at the time that the lab was Anthropic. Of the 1,151 megawatts Riot now has under contract, 1,101 are with that one tenant.
Riot built its Texas sites to mine bitcoin. Its total revenue last quarter was $181.4 million. Mining was 64% of that. At full rent, this one lease brings in nearly 2.5 times the company’s current annual revenue.
Riot supplies the land, the power and the pads. The lab puts in its own computers, runs them and covers the power bill. Rent is owed on all 910 megawatts whether the lab uses them or not. Delivery runs from September 2027 through July 2028.
Texas has an estimated 27% of the country’s data center capacity, according to Wells Fargo. Gov. Greg Abbott halted new data center permits in September. Gina Hinojosa, who beat him last night, wants to stop new data center construction until the legislature writes new rules for developers.
The bottleneck is still power. When new permits dry up, the sites that already have power lined up get more valuable. Cipher, which hasn’t signed its next data center lease, is down 18% today. Cantor Fitzgerald now thinks that lease is more likely to land outside Texas.
Riot is up 9% at around $15.30, above its 8-day moving average near $13.60. It’s well under its 50-day, near $18.50. I’d use the 8-day as my stop.
