Riot Platforms announced a 15-year, 910-megawatt lease at its Corsicana, Texas campus worth about $28 billion, naming the tenant only as “a leading Frontier AI Lab”. Its quarterly report, filed on SEC EDGAR at 14:15Z on 4 November, names it: the lease is “with Anthropic PBC (the “Frontier AI Lab”)”.
By our arithmetic, Anthropic’s two Riot leases are about 97% of the $2.3 billion of lease revenue Riot estimates for 2029, and about 96% of its 1,151 contracted megawatts.
Business Pill · Take-or-Pay
An evergreen Business Engineer explainer on take-or-pay contracts. It teaches the general idea only and does not discuss Riot or Anthropic.
The key insight: Riot’s 10-Q names Anthropic PBC as the Frontier AI Lab behind its 910-megawatt Corsicana lease and, through the same defined term, its 191-megawatt Rockdale lease: about 97% of the 2029 lease revenue Riot estimates for its signed leases, by our arithmetic.
Riot’s release says the lease covers “910 MW of critical IT capacity on a contiguous 332-acre parcel”, with “Approximately $28 billion of total contract value and approximately $1.8 billion of average annual rent, including contractual escalators”. With both five-year extension options, Riot puts the value at about $54 billion.
The 10-Q says the lease was signed on 28 October and “became effective and binding on November 4, 2026”. The tenant “will pay base rent of $130.0 per kilowatt of critical IT load capacity per month for each delivered block of capacity, escalating 3% annually”.
Delivery runs in three phases: 400 MW targeted for September 2027, 200 MW for January 2028 and 310 MW for July 2028. Riot says “Rent is payable on the full 910 MW irrespective of utilization”.
Riot’s revenue today vs its 2029 signed-lease estimate. Source: Riot Platforms Q3 2026 release, presentation and 10-Q (4 Nov 2026), SEC EDGAR; tenant named in the 10-Q. Shares and ratios are our arithmetic.
Key Updates: 🔹 Bitcoin Sales: 20,264 bitcoin sold YTD; ~$1.5B proceeds to fund data center development 🔹 Cash and Bitcoin: $950.2M; no equity raised in 2026
Comments: 🔸 “Today, we are excited to announce the largest lease in Riot’s history: a 15-year triple-net powered land lease with a leading Frontier AI Lab for the entirety of our Corsicana campus, representing 910 megawatts of critical IT capacity and approximately $28 billion of contracted revenue over the initial term.”
🔸 “That lower capital requirement, combined with our strong balance sheet, means that we do not currently anticipate issuing equity to fund our announced projects.”
Wall St Engine’s 12:34Z post summarised Riot’s quarter and the Corsicana lease terms: 15 years, 910 IT MW, about $28 billion of contract value. Riot’s 10-Q, filed at 14:15Z, names the tenant as Anthropic PBC.
The Same Tenant at Rockdale
The 10-Q uses the same defined term, the Frontier AI Lab, for the 191-megawatt Rockdale Lease Riot signed in August, which “carries an initial term of 20 years”. Riot’s CEO Jason Les said the Corsicana deal sits “Together with our AMD contract and the lease signed with the same Frontier AI Lab at Rockdale earlier this year”.
Riot’s presentation estimates 2029 lease revenue of $2,307 million across its signed leases. The Corsicana phases are $1,793 million and Rockdale $452 million, so Anthropic is $2,245 million, about 97%, by our arithmetic. AMD, the third tenant, is $63 million.
A Bitcoin Miner’s Revenue Mix
Riot reported third-quarter revenue of $181.4 million, of which $116.0 million came from Bitcoin Mining, $47.0 million from Engineering and $18.4 million from Data Center. Annualised, that is about $726 million; Corsicana’s $1.8 billion of average annual rent alone is about 2.5 times that, by our arithmetic.
Base rent of $130 per kilowatt per month is about $1.56 million per megawatt per year before escalators, by our arithmetic. Riot’s average annual rent of $1.8 billion over 910 MW works out to about $1.98 million per megawatt, by our arithmetic.
Who Pays for the Build
Riot puts capital at “$6 million per IT MW, or $5.5 billion overall”. It funds $2 million per MW itself and reimburses the tenant up to $4 million per MW for data center modules, about $3.64 billion, by our arithmetic. If project financing on market terms is not available, the 10-Q says Riot “will instead provide rent credits that amortize that amount, plus interest at 12% per year, over the remainder of the initial term”.
The $5.5 billion is about 5.8 times the $950.2 million of cash and bitcoin Riot held on 30 September, by our arithmetic. Riot said it sold 20,264 bitcoin this year for about $1.5 billion, and Les said “we do not currently anticipate issuing equity to fund our announced projects”.
The Texas Backdrop
The lease took effect the day after Texas voters elected Democrat Gina Hinojosa governor; AP called the race at 04:17Z. In July her campaign said she “called on Greg Abbott to sign an emergency executive order putting a moratorium on data centers until the legislature meets”.
Riot’s 10-Q includes a risk factor that, by our comparison, was not in its previous 10-Q or its 2025 10-K: “Increasing political and regulatory scrutiny of data centers in Texas could delay or prevent our data center development, increase our costs, and reduce the incentives available to our projects”. It says the existing Corsicana capacity is energized and not subject to the state’s audit, and that the planned expansion “was studied and approved by ERCOT under its prior large load interconnection process”.
In intraday trading, Riot shares were up 14.4% at 10:28 a.m. ET, according to Nasdaq.com; at 10:27 a.m. ET CoreWeave, IREN and Cipher were down 7% to 19%.
As we read the filings, Riot has signed leases whose average annual rent, about $1.8 billion at Corsicana alone, is about 2.5 times its annualised third-quarter revenue, by our arithmetic, with one tenant behind almost all of it.
As we read the release and the 10-Q, the tenant bears operating costs and power and owns the compute, while Riot delivers the land and power infrastructure on set dates and reimburses up to $4 million per MW of module costs.
Riot Platforms, Q3 2026 release, 4 Nov 2026
“Rent is payable on the full 910 MW irrespective of utilization”
Three Implications
FOR RIOT’S REVENUE MIX Riot’s third-quarter Data Center revenue was $18.4 million; Corsicana’s average rent is about $450 million a quarter, about 24 times, by our arithmetic.
FOR RIOT’S BALANCE SHEET The $5.5 billion of project capital is about 5.8 times the $950.2 million of cash and bitcoin Riot held on 30 September, by our arithmetic.
FOR TEXAS Riot’s 10-Q says the existing Corsicana capacity is already energized and not subject to the state’s audit of data center interconnection requests.
The framework says: “Companies that solve the power equation will dominate the AI era; those that don’t will watch their chips sit idle.”
As we read it, an energized campus with approved interconnection is the asset in that equation. The framework predates this lease and does not discuss Riot or Anthropic.
Riot’s release and presentation do not name the tenant; the name appears in the 10-Q. The 10-Q says Riot intends to file the lease as an exhibit to its 2026 annual report, with certain portions omitted, so the full terms are not yet public. Anthropic’s comment was not available in the filings. Riot’s 2029 revenue figures are its own estimates, and delivery dates are targets.
This Week In The AI Supercycle
Anthropic’s Reality Check, The Capital Squeeze, & The New World Order
This week’s issue: for two years the AI build-out was priced as a growthstory. This week it started being priced as a credit story.
Riot’s 10-Q names Anthropic PBC as the tenant of its $28 billion, 910-megawatt Corsicana lease and, through the same defined term, of its Rockdale lease. Together they are about 97% of Riot’s estimated 2029 lease revenue, against third-quarter revenue of $181.4 million, by our arithmetic.
A note on sourcing. Lease terms and results come from Riot Platforms’ Q3 2026 release and presentation (Exhibits 99.1 and 99.2 to Form 8-K) and its Form 10-Q, filed on SEC EDGAR on 4 November 2026; the tenant’s name appears in the 10-Q. 2029 revenue figures are Riot’s estimates. Share prices are Nasdaq.com intraday last sales. Ratios and per-megawatt figures are our arithmetic.
Gennaro Cuofano is a CRO and tech executive who has worked in AI since late 2015, starting with bringing NLP, natural-language generation, voice and chatbot products to the marketing industry. His background is in law and finance: he holds a Master's degree in Law and an International MBA with an emphasis on corporate finance (LUISS Business School and the University of San Diego, 2012), and worked as a financial analyst at a real-estate investment firm in San Diego and as an assistant controller. His work focuses on business model strategy, business engineering and, more broadly, structural analysis: how companies make money, read from their own filings. He created FourWeekMBA and leads research there and at The Business Engineer, his newsletter on AI and business strategy, with over 95,000 subscribers and more than 1,000 published analyses. His writing has also appeared on Entrepreneur (for example, How to Digitize a Family Business in Europe) and HackerNoon. Find him on LinkedIn and Substack. See how we source.
