Riot Platforms spent years as one of America’s best-known bitcoin miners. This week, its third-quarter earnings made the case that the company is now something else: an AI infrastructure landlord with $38 billion of contracted data center revenue. The centerpiece is a 15-year, triple-net powered-land lease with Anthropic covering the entirety of Riot’s Corsicana, Texas campus — 910 megawatts of critical IT capacity, worth an estimated $28 billion over the initial term and about $54 billion if Anthropic exercises both five-year extension options. Shares closed on November 4 up 9.6% on the day.
The headline number is the largest in Riot’s history. But the more instructive document is the lease itself, as described in Riot’s quarterly filing. Read closely, it is a case study in how the miner-to-landlord model actually works.
The deal, in numbers
The lease covers 910 megawatts of critical IT capacity at Corsicana, where Riot holds 1 gigawatt of utility power. Base rent starts at $130 per kilowatt per month and rises 3% a year, which works out to roughly $1.8 billion in average annual rent once the campus is fully operational, including escalators. Rent is owed on all 910 megawatts whether or not Anthropic uses the capacity, and the tenant pays for electricity and substantially all operating costs.
The agreement began as a letter of intent for 756 megawatts and grew to 910 in the final form, using the same 1 gigawatt of utility power. A Riot subsidiary signed the lease on October 28, and it became binding on November 4, after Riot’s board approved it and outside consultants signed off on the technical specifications. Riot’s earnings release referred to the tenant only as a “leading frontier AI lab”; the quarterly filing names Anthropic PBC.
Delivery is phased. The first block of capacity is targeted for June 28, 2027, with the full 400-megawatt first phase due by September 2027. A second phase of 200 megawatts follows in January 2028, and the final 310 megawatts are scheduled for July 2028. Riot expects lease revenue of about $23 million this year, rising to roughly $250 million in 2027, $1.8 billion in 2028, and $2.3 billion in 2029 as the phases come online.
Who builds what — and who pays
The $5.5 billion price tag is where the structure gets interesting. About $1.8 billion of it is Riot’s own work: the site, the buildings, and the electrical infrastructure. Up to $3.6 billion more goes to reimbursing Anthropic for the data center modules — the computing facilities the tenant installs and owns. That split is the essence of the powered-land model: Riot supplies the land and the power, Anthropic supplies the machines.
The reimbursement mechanics matter more than the totals. Anthropic’s module costs are eligible for reimbursement only after each phase is delivered and begins earning rent, and the amounts depend on actual costs incurred. Riot’s plan is to fund those reimbursements with project debt. If that financing is unavailable, the lease provides a fallback: Anthropic recovers its eligible module costs by deducting them from future rent, plus interest at 12% a year, amortized over the remainder of the initial term.
That 12% figure is the most revealing number in the filing. It is, in effect, the price Riot pays for financing risk. If the project debt market cooperates, Riot borrows at project-finance rates and reimburses Anthropic in cash. If it does not, Riot’s tenant becomes its lender of last resort — at a rate that would make most infrastructure lenders blush. The clause converts a financing contingency into a contractual obligation, and it prices what it costs a former miner to borrow like a landlord before the market has decided it is one.
The financing plan
Riot’s financing illustration assumes lenders cover 80% to 90% of the project’s cost, leaving Riot to contribute roughly $500 million to $1.1 billion in cash equity. The financing process is set to launch in 2027. Management told investors it has raised no equity capital in 2026 and does not expect to issue new shares to fund any announced project.
That is a striking claim for a $5.5 billion build, and it rests on two pillars. The first is the lease itself: a 15-year contract with a tenant whose demand for compute is, for now, effectively unlimited is exactly the kind of contracted cash flow project finance lenders underwrite. The second is Riot’s balance sheet — specifically, its bitcoin treasury, which is doing the work that a corporate bond or an equity raise would do at a conventional developer. In the first nine months of 2026, Riot sold 20,264 bitcoin for approximately $1.5 billion, mostly to fund data center development and repay a $200 million Coinbase loan. It sold 10,599 bitcoin in the third quarter alone, while mining just 1,637. Only 2,418 bitcoin remained at the end of September, and management expects to keep selling substantially all newly mined coins. The treasury that once defined the company’s identity is being liquidated to build its replacement.
What project finance says about this
Read through the project finance lens, the Corsicana deal is a recognizable structure with one unusual feature. The recognizable parts: a single-asset vehicle, contracted revenue from a creditworthy counterparty, and non-recourse debt sized against the cash flows rather than the sponsor’s balance sheet. At 80% to 90% leverage, the structure sits above the 60% to 80% typical for contracted generation — a reflection of the contract’s length and the tenant’s quality.
The unusual feature is the reimbursement obligation. In a conventional project finance, the sponsor builds the asset and the offtaker pays for its output. Here the tenant builds a large part of the asset — the modules — and the sponsor owes it the money back, with interest, if the debt market does not fund it first. The 12% fallback rate prices a risk that does not exist in a wind farm or a solar plant: the risk that a tenant which is itself spending tens of billions on compute commitments ends up carrying its landlord’s construction bill.
The delivery risk sits with Riot
The lease puts most of the delivery risk on the landlord. If Riot delivers a phase more than 60 days late, Anthropic earns escalating rent credits, capped at 270 days of base rent for the undelivered blocks. If a phase is not delivered within 270 days of its target, Anthropic can terminate the lease for that phase on 30 days’ notice, subject to force majeure extensions of up to 365 days. Riot’s own right to terminate is narrow: uncured payment defaults and bankruptcy events. A change of control involving certain restricted parties would let Anthropic terminate or buy Riot’s interest in the premises at 95% of fair market value.
Those terms are the mirror image of the rent guarantee. Anthropic is committing to pay for 910 megawatts for 15 years, sight unseen, on a campus that does not yet exist as a data center. In exchange, it gets hard deadlines, escalating penalties, and an exit. For investors, the delivery schedule is the thing to watch: June 2027 is less than eight months away, and the first phase is the largest single block in the deal.
The flexibility Riot gave up
There is a quieter clause in the filing that may matter as much as the money. Riot cannot voluntarily curtail Anthropic’s power load at Corsicana, or enroll the premises in voluntary demand-response programs, without Anthropic’s consent. Mandatory orders from the utility or grid operator are exempt. The restriction applies only to the tenant’s load — Riot’s other mining operations are unaffected — but it is a notable limit for a company that built part of its mining business on selling power back to the Texas grid.
The economics of that trade are visible in Riot’s own quarter. The company recorded $24.7 million in power-curtailment credits companywide in the third quarter — $22.9 million from manual curtailment and $1.7 million from demand response — earned by shutting down mining equipment when the value of returning electricity to the grid exceeded the value of the bitcoin it would have produced. That flexibility was a genuine profit center, and it was possible because a mining rig can be switched off in seconds with no customer to disappoint.
An AI training cluster cannot. The curtailment clause is the contractual recognition of that difference: the tenant’s load is firm, and the landlord’s flexibility is gone. For the grid, the implication cuts both ways. A 910-megawatt load that cannot be voluntarily curtailed is a firmer, more predictable load for ERCOT planners — but it is also a load that cannot be called on as a demand-side resource in a scarcity event, unless the grid operator orders it.
The counterparty question
With Corsicana, Riot has now contracted 1,151 megawatts across three leases signed this year — the 910-megawatt Corsicana deal, a 191-megawatt lease at Rockdale, and a 50-megawatt agreement with AMD — representing approximately $38 billion in contracted revenue. Management expects the portfolio to generate about $2.2 billion in average annual net operating income at full deployment, at an unlevered yield on cost of roughly 28%.
Concentration is the obvious caveat. Anthropic is the tenant on 1,101 of those 1,151 megawatts: Corsicana plus the 20-year, $9.1 billion Rockdale lease signed in August, which runs through June 2048 and could reach $16.1 billion with extensions. That is a single private company underwriting nearly the entire transformation of a public company. The Rockdale deal came with a $573 million interim facility from Morgan Stanley while Riot finalized an investment-grade credit backstop — a reminder that the credit question around a private AI tenant is not yet fully settled.
The $28 billion and $38 billion figures also deserve the usual caution. They are expected contract revenue over the full lease terms, including escalators, presented before the amortization of tenant reimbursements, which under lease accounting will reduce reported lease revenue over the term. The cash Riot actually collects in the early years will be smaller than the headline rent, because some of it goes to repaying Anthropic for the modules. The $2.2 billion NOI figure is a management estimate, not a realized result.
The quarter behind the announcement
The earnings themselves were a portrait of a company mid-transition. Third-quarter revenue rose 1% year over year to $181.4 million, but the mix told the story: bitcoin mining revenue fell nearly 28% to $116 million, from $160.8 million a year earlier, while data center operations contributed $18.4 million and engineering $47 million. Net income was about $4 million, or a penny a share, down from $104.5 million a year earlier. Adjusted EBITDA was $191 million. Riot ended September with $748.2 million in cash and $950.2 million of total liquidity.
The AMD agreement, the smallest of the three leases, is the only one with operating history so far: 25 megawatts delivered on time and on budget, with the next 10 megawatts due this month and the full expansion expected online in May. It is the only operating proof point Riot has; the other two leases are promises about campuses still under construction.
What the model reveals
Step back, and the Corsicana lease is a template for the miner-to-landlord conversion now underway across the sector. The miner’s assets are not its rigs, which depreciate fast and are worth little to anyone else. They are the land, the interconnection, and the power — the scarce inputs that AI developers cannot buy quickly anywhere else. The insight, shared by every miner now pursuing the same pivot, is that a gigawatt of approved grid capacity in Texas is worth more as a landlord’s asset than as a miner’s input.
The lease structure shows what that conversion requires. The landlord must fund billions in construction before the first rent check arrives. It must accept delivery deadlines with real penalties. It must give up the operational flexibility that made mining profitable. And it must convince lenders that a 15-year promise from a private AI company is as bankable as a 20-year PPA from a regulated utility. Riot’s answer, so far, is to fund the gap with its bitcoin treasury and to price the financing risk at 12% in the fine print.
Whether the model works will be decided in 2027, when the financing launches and the first concrete is poured at Corsicana. What is not yet known is the rate at which the market will lend against a 15-year promise from a private AI company — and whether the landlord can deliver 910 megawatts on its tenant’s schedule.
The bottom line
Riot’s $28 billion lease with Anthropic is the largest single validation yet of the miner-to-landlord thesis: scarce power and interconnection, packaged as a long-term triple-net lease, can command infrastructure-scale valuations. The structure is sound in outline — contracted rent, a creditworthy tenant, non-recourse project debt — but the details carry the risk. A $3.6 billion reimbursement obligation at 12% if financing falters, delivery deadlines with termination rights, near-total counterparty concentration in one private tenant, and a funding plan that depends on liquidating a bitcoin treasury that is nearly empty. Investors underwriting this transformation should read the lease, not the headline. The headline is $28 billion. The lease is where the economics live.