Riot signed $9.1 billion AI lease in a break from bitcoin mining

Riot Platforms said on August 10, 2026 that it had executed a 20-year data-center lease with an unnamed “leading frontier AI lab” for 191 megawatts of critical information-technology capacity at its Rockdale, Texas campus. The bitcoin miner estimated $9.1 billion of base-rent revenue over the initial term, which is scheduled to run through June 2048.

The signed lease was consequential because it moved Riot’s diversification beyond a presentation about optional power assets. A business built around bitcoin mining had committed a large block of energized infrastructure to a non-mining customer under a multi-decade contract. On the information available on August 10, the customer remained unnamed, and the revenue, delivery and profitability figures were management forecasts rather than realized results.

What Riot disclosed

The build-to-suit project covers 191 MW of Tier 3 critical IT capacity. Riot expected to deliver the first 96 MW in December 2027 and the full capacity in June 2028. The tenant received two successive five-year renewal options. Riot said those options could lift total contract value to about $16.1 billion, but that figure was conditional on both options being exercised.

Riot also projected cumulative net operating income of $7.3 billion to $8.2 billion during the base term, or an average of $365 million to $411 million annually. Those are forward-looking company estimates, not audited cash flows. The company identified construction, financing, permitting, supply-chain, technical and leasing risks that could cause actual performance to differ.

A $573 million interim credit facility from lenders led by Morgan Stanley Senior Funding was intended to cover long-lead equipment and other development costs while a longer-term credit backstop was being finalized. The quarterly filing said the facility carried interest at the Secured Overnight Financing Rate plus 2.75 percentage points and matured on October 15, 2026, subject to extension in connection with refinancing. That short interim maturity made the financing path an important execution dependency.

Why a bitcoin miner wanted AI tenants

Riot’s June-quarter figures showed why the contract mattered strategically. Bitcoin-mining revenue was $113.7 million, down from $140.9 million in the quarter ended June 30, 2025. Riot attributed the decline primarily to a lower average bitcoin price and higher global network hash rate, partly offset by its own higher operating hash rate. Meanwhile, its new Data Center segment produced $23.2 million of quarterly revenue from an earlier AMD deployment and related fit-out work.

The comparison does not prove that AI hosting would be more profitable than mining. It does show that Riot had begun reporting data centers as a separate business and had an operating reference customer before announcing the much larger lease. Together with AMD’s 50 MW of contracted capacity, Riot said it had executed 241 MW of AI-related leases representing about $9.8 billion in long-term contracted revenue.

The funding connection to bitcoin was also explicit. During the six months ended June 30, 2026, Riot sold 9,665 bitcoin for $732.5 million in proceeds. Its filing said it could sell or leverage bitcoin to fund capital expenditures and strategic initiatives. At June 30, Riot held 11,380 bitcoin, including 5,821 pledged as collateral; it valued the total at $666.0 million using Coinbase’s $58,527 closing price for that date. That is a company balance-sheet snapshot, not an August 10 market price.

The limit of the announcement

The August 10 record established an executed lease, specified capacity, a delivery schedule and interim financing. It did not establish that the facilities had been built, that the projected rent or operating income would be collected, or that the unnamed tenant’s identity had been confirmed. The significance was therefore institutional rather than immediate: Riot was converting power accumulated for bitcoin mining into contracted infrastructure for AI, while retaining construction, credit and concentration risks that would take years to resolve.