Riot Leases Its Whole Corsicana Campus to an AI Lab for $28 Billion

Riot Platforms signed a 15-year lease for its entire Corsicana, Texas, campus with an unnamed AI lab, a deal the bitcoin miner values at about $28 billion over the initial term. It announced the lease Wednesday in its third-quarter report.

The tenant is the same lab that signed a lease at Riot's Rockdale site earlier this year, the company said. Rent averages about $1.8 billion a year, including built-in annual increases. Two five-year extensions would lift the total to about $54 billion. CEO Jason Les called it "the largest lease in Riot's history."

Riot brings the land and power, the lab brings the chips

The deal is a "triple-net powered land lease." In plain words, Riot delivers 332 acres, the grid connection and powered pads, which are prepared sites wired for electricity. The tenant buys, installs and runs its own computers and pays nearly all operating costs, power included. Rent is owed on the full 910 megawatts whether the lab uses it or not.

That setup keeps Riot's bill low. Building costs about $6 million per megawatt, or $5.5 billion in all, roughly half a typical data center build, Riot says. Riot pays $2 million per megawatt itself. The other $4 million is reimbursed to the tenant after each phase starts paying rent, funded with project debt or, failing that, rent credits. Riot says it does not expect to issue new shares. Blockspace also reported the lease terms.

Power arrives in three steps: 400 megawatts in September 2027, 200 in January 2028 and 310 in July 2028.

Mining still pays most of the bills

Bitcoin mining brought in $116.0 million of Riot's $181.4 million in quarterly revenue, down from $160.8 million a year earlier as its average bitcoin price fell to $70,855. Riot mined 1,637 bitcoin in the quarter. It has sold 20,264 bitcoin this year for about $1.5 billion, mostly to fund data centers, and held 2,418 at Sept. 30.

In our opinion: Riot now has $38 billion of signed lease revenue and one lab behind most of it, which makes this a miner turning landlord with a very large tenant. That is a sturdier income stream than block rewards, as long as the tenant keeps paying. The date to circle is September 2027, when the first 400 megawatts are due and rent starts within 60 days.