Riot Signs 15-Year, $28 Billion AI Lease for Its 910 MW Corsicana Campus as Q3 Revenue Tops Estimates

Riot Platforms RIOT signed a 15-year lease for the full 910 megawatts of critical IT capacity at its Corsicana, Texas campus, a deal the company values at about $28 billion of total contract value over the initial term. Riot's filing names the tenant only as "a leading Frontier AI Lab" and puts average annual rent at about $1.8 billion. Capacity is due in three phases: 400 MW in September 2027, 200 MW in January 2028 and the final 310 MW in July 2028. If both five-year extensions are exercised, the contract value rises to about $54 billion.

The lease landed alongside third-quarter results that beat expectations. Revenue was $181.43 million against a consensus estimate of $159.71 million, and EPS came in at $0.01 versus an expected loss of $0.32 per share. The mix is shifting: engineering revenue rose to $47.0 million from $19.1 million a year earlier, while bitcoin mining revenue fell to $116.0 million from $160.8 million, according to Riot's release.

Corsicana turns an August letter of intent into a signed lease and joins Riot's Rockdale lease with a frontier AI lab (191 MW over 20 years, about $9.1 billion) and a smaller lease with AMD. Riot says it has now contracted 1,151 megawatts and about $38 billion of data center revenue in total. The roughly $2.2 billion of average annual net operating income Riot highlighted refers to that whole contracted portfolio, not Corsicana alone.

On funding, Riot says no equity issuance is currently anticipated. It plans to pay for site and electrical work from existing liquidity, including bitcoin sales, and to fund up to $3.64 billion of tenant fit-out reimbursements with non-recourse project debt sized to contracted rent. Rent is owed on the full 910 MW regardless of utilization once each phase is delivered.

Shares traded as much as about 20% higher early Wednesday and were up roughly 10% late in the session, per SentiSense's delayed quote. Investors will likely watch project-debt terms, construction progress through 2028, and Texas policy risk: 24/7 Wall St. pointed to a Bloomberg report that Texas's governor-elect has called for a moratorium on data center development, and noted that 5,821 bitcoin are pledged as collateral.