Key points
- Riot signed a 20-year lease for 191 MW of critical IT at its Rockdale, Texas campus with an unnamed frontier AI lab. The base term through June 2048 carries $9.1 billion of contracted revenue, or $16.1 billion if both five-year extensions are exercised.
- Riot postponed its August 5 earnings call on August 4 with no reason and no new date. The rescheduled call ran Monday at 4:30 p.m. Eastern, and the lease was announced with it.
- RIOT closed at $19.37, down 5.6% with the whole mining group on a bitcoin selloff, then traded at $21.70 after hours at 5:26 p.m. Eastern, up 12.0% from the close.
- Q2 revenue was $174.2 million, up 14% from a year ago. Bitcoin mining fell to $113.7 million from $140.9 million, and the net loss was $237.2 million.
- Bernstein named RIOT insulated from the Texas grid freeze on August 4. Riot's release says the new lease runs on its "existing, fully approved interconnection" at Rockdale.
- Nothing bills for a while. Riot expects to deliver 96 MW by December 2027 and the full 191 MW by June 2028.
Last week, on August 4, Riot Platforms (RIOT) postponed its second-quarter earnings call, one day before it was scheduled to take place. The company gave no reason and no new date.
Six days later, the call finally ran, and the explanation showed up with it. Riot signed a 20-year data center lease for 191 megawatts of critical IT at its Rockdale campus in Texas, with a tenant it will only describe as "one of the world's leading frontier AI labs." Contracted revenue is $9.1 billion over the base term through June 2048, and $16.1 billion if that tenant picks up both five-year extension options.
We wrote about the postponement last week, when the agentic account killed a RIOT trade that was already up 9% intraday, on the reasoning that a company pulling its call without saying why usually isn't sitting on good news. That was a fair read. It was also completely backwards.
It didn't matter during Monday's session anyway. Bitcoin slid toward $64,000 after Strategy disclosed a sale of 1,690 BTC, and the miners went down as a group. RIOT closed at $19.37, one of nine major miners that finished red.
| Stock | Monday close | Change |
|---|---|---|
| Hut 8 (HUT) | $85.67 | -3.3% |
| Cipher Digital (CIFR) | $16.32 | -5.0% |
| TeraWulf (WULF) | $16.20 | -5.2% |
| MARA Holdings (MARA) | $9.55 | -5.4% |
| Riot Platforms (RIOT) | $19.37 | -5.6% |
| CleanSpark (CLSK) | $11.60 | -5.7% |
| IREN Ltd (IREN) | $38.71 | -6.1% |
| Core Scientific (CORZ) | $19.47 | -7.4% |
| HIVE Digital (HIVE) | $2.61 | -8.3% |
Then the release landed. RIOT traded at $21.70 at 5:26 p.m. Eastern, up 12.0% from where it closed.
The approved-megawatts trade paid off in six days
Governor Greg Abbott ordered Texas to audit every data center sitting in ERCOT's interconnection queue on August 3, and new approvals have been frozen since. We covered that the next day, including the Bernstein note telling clients that already-approved megawatts had just gotten more valuable. Bernstein put Cipher, CleanSpark and Core Scientific on the exposed list, and it put Riot on the insulated one.
Riot's release argues the same thing in its own words. The lease works by "leveraging Riot's existing, fully approved interconnection at the Rockdale campus." CEO Jason Les led his own comments with power capacity that's already approved and energized. Nobody puts that language up front by accident during the week Texas quits approving anything new.
Les framed the last six months this way: "Riot has now executed leases totaling 241 megawatts of capacity, representing approximately $9.8 billion of long-term, contracted revenue with two of the most important companies in the AI ecosystem." The other company is AMD, which doubled its contracted Rockdale footprint to 50 MW for $636 million over a 10-year primary term. The first 25 MW is delivered and the second is still under construction.
The quarter itself was rough
Revenue came to $174.2 million, up 14% from $153.0 million a year ago, and the mix is doing something Riot wants you to notice.
| Segment | Q2 2026 | Q2 2025 |
|---|---|---|
| Bitcoin mining | $113.7M | $140.9M |
| Engineering | $37.3M | $10.6M |
| Data center | $23.2M | not broken out |
| Total | $174.2M | $153.0M |
Only $4.9 million of that data center line is actual lease revenue from AMD. The other $18.3 million is tenant fit-out work, which is Riot getting paid to build the space rather than to rent it.
Riot lost $237.2 million in the quarter. It produced 1,587 BTC at a cash cost of $49,912 each, which doesn't leave much cushion with bitcoin in the mid $60,000s, and it holds 11,380 BTC with 5,821 of those pledged as collateral.
The lease money is also a long way out. Riot expects to deliver 96 MW by December 2027 and the rest by June 2028, so the $9.1 billion doesn't start arriving for another 16 months at the earliest. Mining pays the bills until then, and mining is the line that's shrinking.
Riot calls this its "second tenant at the Rockdale campus, following the lease with Advanced Micro Devices, Inc." Two tenants in just over six months, both landing on power that was already approved, is the part I would watch. Whether Riot can do it a third time decides how much of that $9.1 billion the market pays for today.
Sources
- Riot Platforms, "Riot Platforms Reports Second Quarter 2026 Financial Results and Strategic Highlights," August 10, 2026, for the lease terms, the segment revenue, the net loss, the BTC figures and every Jason Les quote
- Riot Platforms, "Riot Announces New Date for Second Quarter 2026 Earnings Conference Call," August 9, 2026, for the rescheduled August 10 call
- Bernstein research note, August 4, 2026, via The Block, for the exposed and insulated lists
- CoinDesk, August 10, 2026, for the bitcoin decline and the Strategy sale
- Prices are the August 10, 2026 regular session closes against the August 7 closes, with the RIOT after-hours quote taken at 5:09 p.m. Eastern
