Key points
- Riot leases its Corsicana campus for about $28 billion
- Riot's filing names Anthropic as the tenant
- Riot expects to spend $5.5 billion on the site
Riot Platforms (RIOT) has leased its entire Corsicana, Texas, campus to Anthropic for 15 years, according to a quarterly filing on November 4. The deal is worth about $28 billion, or about $54 billion if Anthropic uses both five-year extensions, Riot said.
Riot's press release and earnings presentation call the tenant only a "Frontier AI Lab." The company's 10-Q names Anthropic PBC and applies the same term to the tenant at Rockdale, Texas. Bloomberg identified the Rockdale tenant as Anthropic in August.
Riot shares traded at $15.67 as of 12:10 p.m. ET, up 11.7% from their November 3 close of $14.02.
What is a powered land lease?
At Rockdale, Riot is building the data center itself, at an expected cost of $11 million to $12 million per megawatt. The Corsicana lease divides the work differently.
Riot will provide the land, power infrastructure, and powered pads, sites where the tenant's equipment can connect to power. The tenant will buy, install, own, and operate modular computing units on those pads, according to Riot's earnings presentation.
The tenant will pay for electricity and substantially all operating costs. Riot calls it a triple-net lease, a structure in which the tenant typically covers property taxes, insurance, and maintenance. Rent is due on all 910 megawatts, whether or not the tenant uses them.
Riot expects its total cost to be about $5.5 billion, or $6 million per megawatt. That includes up to $3.64 billion to reimburse the tenant for its modules; the remaining roughly $1.8 billion covers site work.
Base rent is $130 per kilowatt a month, rising 3% a year. Riot expects average rent of about $1.8 billion a year, or $1.98 million per megawatt, by our calculations. Rockdale's $451 million a year works out to about $2.36 million per megawatt. That lease includes operating services, though, and Riot is building the data center itself.
How do we know the tenant is Anthropic?
The 10-Q says a Riot subsidiary signed the lease on October 28 "with Anthropic PBC (the 'Frontier AI Lab')." The lease took effect on November 4, after Riot's board approved it and outside consultants approved the technical specifications.
Riot's release refers to "the lease signed with the same Frontier AI Lab at Rockdale earlier this year." Riot described the Rockdale tenant only as a frontier AI lab in August.
That lease covers 191 megawatts over 20 years and carries about $9.1 billion of contract revenue. Our August story covered that deal, and our AI compute tracker lists both leases as Anthropic commitments.
The Corsicana deal started as a letter of intent for 756 megawatts. The final lease covers 910 megawatts from the same 1 gigawatt of utility power. Chief Executive Jason Les said on the earnings call that the tenant wanted the most capacity the site could hold, even if use varies during the year.
How will Riot pay for it?
Riot plans to raise $4.4 billion to $4.9 billion of project debt that has no claim on the parent company, and to cover the remaining $500 million to $1.1 billion with its own cash. Riot plans to start that financing in 2027.
The lease has a fallback. Riot's reimbursements depend on financing on market terms reasonably acceptable to Riot. If that isn't available, Anthropic recovers the money through rent credits instead. Those credits carry 12% annual interest, according to the 10-Q. Chief Financial Officer Jason Chung described a tighter credit market on the call, with spreads wider since September.
Rockdale has a different setup. Riot says it's finalizing credit support for that debt from an unnamed high investment-grade counterparty. On the same day, Google (GOOGL) agreed to backstop Anthropic's leases at TeraWulf (WULF). Riot didn't say who is providing its support.
Riot says it hasn't raised equity in 2026 and doesn't currently expect to for its announced projects. The company has funded its data center work largely by selling bitcoin. Riot sold 20,264 bitcoin for about $1.5 billion in the first nine months of the year and held 2,418 at the end of September, down from 11,380 at the end of June.
How did Riot's quarter look?
Third-quarter revenue rose 1% from a year earlier to $181.4 million, above the $159.7 million analysts expected, according to Investing.com. Net income was $4 million, or $0.01 a share, against an expected loss of about 32 cents. That result included a $172 million gain on the value of Riot's bitcoin.
Data center revenue was $18.4 million, most of it from the first 25 megawatts delivered to AMD (AMD). Riot now has 1,151 megawatts leased across three deals and about $38 billion of contracted revenue. Riot expects lease revenue of about $23 million this year, about $250 million in 2027, $1.8 billion in 2028, and $2.3 billion in 2029.
The first block at Corsicana is targeted for June 28, 2027. The first 400 megawatts are due by September 2027, followed by 200 megawatts in January 2028 and 310 megawatts in July 2028. Riot told analysts that both Texas campuses already have approved power connections, so no new power-connection approvals are needed. That question came up the day after voters backed data center limits across the country.
