Riot Leases All of Corsicana to Anthropic: 910 MW of Powered Land, No Building

Riot Platforms, Inc. (Nasdaq: RIOT) announced on November 4, 2026, with its third quarter results, that it had signed a 15-year triple-net powered land lease for the entirety of its Corsicana campus in Navarro County, Texas, covering 910 megawatts of critical IT capacity on a contiguous 332-acre parcel. The release, furnished to the SEC the same day as Exhibit 99.1 to a Form 8-K, puts the total contract value at approximately $28 billion and average annual rent at approximately $1.8 billion over the initial term, including escalators, and approximately $54 billion if the tenant exercises both five-year extension options. Riot estimates an NOI margin of about 99 percent under the triple-net structure. Chief executive Jason Les called it “the largest lease in Riot’s history.” The release names the tenant only as “a leading Frontier AI Lab,” the same lab that signed the 191 megawatt Rockdale lease in August. Those are the company’s figures and characterizations, not PSV findings.

Riot’s quarterly report on Form 10-Q, filed November 4, carries the contract terms. It says Riot Corsicana, LLC entered the lease on October 28, 2026 “with Anthropic PBC (the ‘Frontier AI Lab’),” and that it became effective and binding on November 4 after Riot’s board approved it and the company’s third-party consultants approved the technical specifications. Because the report uses the same defined term for the Rockdale tenant, the filed record now identifies Anthropic at both campuses. Capacity arrives in 40 blocks across three phases: 400 megawatts with the first block targeted for June 28, 2027 and the full phase for September 11, 2027; 200 megawatts from December 24, 2027 to January 28, 2028; and 310 megawatts on July 30, 2028. The initial term runs to the month of the 15th anniversary of Phase 3. Base rent is $130.0 per kilowatt of critical IT capacity per month for each delivered block, escalating 3 percent a year, and the tenant also bears taxes, insurance, site expenses and the electricity it uses. Riot builds and maintains the power and site infrastructure at its own cost and will reimburse the tenant for data center modules up to $4.0 million per megawatt achieved, subject to obtaining financing on market terms; if it cannot, it provides rent credits that amortize that amount plus 12 percent annual interest over the rest of the initial term.

The structure is the news. In this lease the landlord sells interconnection, substations and graded, powered pads, and the tenant brings the building, as factory-made modules it owns. Riot says total capital is about $6 million per IT megawatt, or $5.5 billion, which it describes as roughly half the capital intensity of a typical Tier 3 build, and it puts the unlevered yield on cost at about 33 percent. The arithmetic holds on Riot’s own numbers: $1.8 billion of average rent over $5.5 billion computes to 32.7 percent. PSV’s own run of the filed terms comes out close to the release. At full capacity, $130 per kilowatt a month on 910,000 kilowatts computes to about $1.42 billion of base rent in the first year, and averaging 15 years of 3 percent escalation computes to about $1.76 billion a year, or roughly $26.4 billion over 15 years. Rent on the first two phases before Phase 3 starts the 15-year clock accounts for much of the gap to Riot’s $28 billion; the filed terms do not say exactly when each block’s escalator starts, so PSV does not reconcile the last few hundred million dollars.

Set it next to Riot’s other lease with the same tenant and the two products separate cleanly. The comparison below uses only Riot’s published figures, and the per-kilowatt and per-megawatt rates are PSV arithmetic on them.

Anyone underwriting a powered land deal, whether as landlord, lender or buyer of the paper, should build the rent model from the lease clauses, not the press release, because the two describe the fallback differently. The release says that if project debt is not available on comparable terms, the tenant funds the reimbursements and recovers them as a credit against rent. The 10-Q adds the price: the credits amortize the amount plus 12 percent a year. Inputs for the model: the block delivery schedule, the rent commencement clause for each pad, the base rate and escalator, the reimbursement cap and its financing condition, the credit interest rate, the triple-net cost list, and the utility interconnection agreement. Output: a monthly cash rent schedule under both reimbursement paths, every line citing the clause it came from. On PSV’s arithmetic, amortizing the full $3.64 billion at 12 percent over 15 years computes to about $534 million a year, roughly 30 percent of average rent, so the path chosen moves cash rent more than any other single term.

The reviewer is the deal team’s real estate counsel with the asset manager who owns the power schedule, and the approval gate is that no rent forecast leaves the building until counsel has tied each line to the executed lease. An assistant can draft the schedule and flag where the record is silent; it should not decide which financing path is likely or what the tenant’s credit is worth. Two things to design against: treating the 99 percent NOI margin as cash yield when rent credits may be netting against it, and assuming the campus is free of its current use. Riot’s 10-Q says Corsicana is equipped today for roughly 400 megawatts of bitcoin mining, and the filings PSV read do not say when that ends.