Riot leases Corsicana to Anthropic in $28B deal

Riot Platforms has signed a 15-year lease for its entire Corsicana campus in Texas, 910 megawatts of critical IT capacity on 332 acres, which it values at about $28 billion, according to its results release on Wednesday, 4 Nov.

The release describes the tenant only as a frontier AI lab. Riot’s quarterly filing names it: Anthropic PBC, under a lease signed on 28 Oct that took effect on 4 Nov.

The deal arrives as mining earns less. Riot’s bitcoin mining revenue fell 28% in the third quarter to $116.0 million, from $160.8 million a year earlier, even though it produced more coins.

The business model, in one sentence: Riot supplies land, power and site work, the tenant brings and runs its own computers, and Riot collects rent.

The deal

Riot estimates average annual rent at about $1.8 billion, including escalators, and the total at about $54 billion if both five-year extensions are used.

The lease is triple-net, so the tenant bears substantially all operating costs, including power. Rent is due on the full 910 MW whether or not it is used, starting within 60 days of each delivery.

Riot says the build will cost about $6 million per megawatt, or $5.5 billion. It funds $2 million per megawatt itself. The other $4 million is reimbursed to the tenant in phases, paid for with non-recourse project debt or, failing that, recovered as a credit against rent.

Riot said it does not currently expect to issue equity for the project. With this lease, its contracted data centre business reaches 1,151 MW and about $38 billion of revenue, including a deal with AMD and an earlier Rockdale lease with the same lab.

The numbers

Total revenue was $181.4 million, up from $180.2 million. Engineering revenue more than doubled to $47.0 million, and data centre revenue was $18.4 million.

Riot mined 1,637 bitcoin, up from 1,406, but the average price it received fell to $70,855 from $114,361. Net income was $4.0 million, or $0.01 a share, against $104.5 million a year earlier, the filing shows.

Peers have taken the same turn: Iole said last week it would sell all its bitcoin for AI data centres, while the network’s hashrate kept rising.

The skeptics

Riot’s own disclosures give skeptics their material.

The same tenant now accounts for both of Riot’s big leases, and no Corsicana rent arrives before the first delivery in September 2027. The filing records a net loss of $733.6 million for the first nine months of 2026.

Riot has also run down its bitcoin. It sold 20,264 BTC in the first nine months for about $1.5 billion and repaid and closed a $200 million credit facility with Coinbase. It held 2,418 BTC on 30 Sep, worth about $202.0 million.

What’s next

Riot shares closed 9.6% higher at $15.37 on Wednesday, Yahoo Finance data show.

Riot plans to hand over a first 400 MW in September 2027, then 200 MW in January 2028 and the last 310 MW in July 2028. For context on the sector’s quarter, see Coinbase’s results.

This article is for information only and is not investment advice.