Riot signs $28 billion AI lease as mining profit collapses

Riot Platforms earned $4 million in the third quarter, down from $104.5 million a year earlier. The bitcoin miner sold most of the coins it mined to help fund a new $28 billion lease with an AI company.

Those figures came from Riot's quarterly earnings release, published November 4. Revenue reached $181.4 million, barely above the $180.2 million booked a year earlier. Net income fell 96 percent. Mining still brought in the most money, $116 million, but that was down about 28 percent as the average price Riot earned per coin dropped to $70,855 from $114,361. Engineering work added $47 million, up from $19.1 million. The company produced 1,637 bitcoin in the three months, 16 percent more than a year before, which cushioned the fall only a little.

Why the profit nearly vanished

Two forces squeezed Riot at once. Bitcoin traded lower through the quarter, so each mined coin brought in less. At the same time, the company kept selling coins for cash. Riot sold 20,264 bitcoin in the first nine months of 2026 for about $1.5 billion, most of it to pay for data center construction. That sets it apart from bitcoin treasury firms like Strategy, which keep buying coins rather than selling them.

The selling left a thin cushion. At the end of September, Riot held $748.2 million in cash and just 2,418 bitcoin, worth about $202 million at the quarter-end price of $83,554 a coin. Its own hoard had stood at 11,380 coins three months earlier, so the company parted with the bulk of its stack in a single quarter. Riot is not the only crypto firm whose latest quarter leaned on something other than its main business, as Coinbase's profit from the crypto it holds showed days earlier.

A $28 billion bet on AI

That headline number did not come from mining at all. Riot signed a 15-year lease to host an artificial intelligence tenant at its Corsicana campus in Texas. The deal covers 910 megawatts of computing capacity on a single 332-acre site. Riot put the total contract value near $28 billion, about $1.8 billion in rent each year. Exercise both five-year extension options and the figure reaches roughly $54 billion.

Riot did not name the tenant. It called the firm only a leading frontier AI lab. Across its whole portfolio, including a separate 191 megawatt deal at its Rockdale site, Riot now claims about $38 billion in contracted data center revenue. Riot expects the Corsicana lease alone to run at a net operating income margin near 99 percent, roughly $1.8 billion a year once the site is full. The new capacity arrives in stages: 400 megawatts in September 2027, 200 megawatts in January 2028, and 310 megawatts in July 2028.

The move is not a leap in the dark. Bitcoin miners spent years locking up cheap power and large plots of land, the very things AI companies now chase. Riot's Texas sites already carry grid connections that a newcomer would wait years to secure. A stabilized 25 megawatts rented to chipmaker AMD brought in $18.4 million this quarter, a small preview of the model Riot wants to scale. The same shift has pulled in other listed miners this year as mining margins thinned.

Jason Les, Riot's chief executive, called it the largest lease in the company's history. He said the firm does not plan to sell new shares to pay for the build. "We do not currently anticipate issuing equity to fund our announced projects," Les said.

Does bitcoin mining still pay?

Riot's own cost figure looks healthy. The company said it mined each bitcoin for $39,265 in the quarter, after power curtailment credits, and sold the coins for more. That number leaves out the rigs. Count their depreciation, as analysts at 24/7 Wall St did, and the fully loaded cost climbs to about $78,805 a coin. On that math the mining segment ran at a loss of roughly $37.7 million. The gap is stark. What keeps the lights on is cash, not accounting profit: adjusted earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization still came to $191.3 million, and that is the money paying for the build.

What to watch

Signed does not mean built. Almost none of the Corsicana capacity exists today. The first 400 megawatts are not due until September 2027, and the full project needs about $5.5 billion in capital. Riot says it can fund that without selling new stock. That promise will be tested over the next two years.

Plenty could still go wrong. The unnamed lab must still want all 910 megawatts when the power switches on in 2027 and 2028. Riot has to build on time and on budget. Its shares rose about 13 percent on November 4, so traders liked the news for now. Whether the cash keeps flowing is the real test.