en.Wedoany.com Reported - On August 10, U.S. digital infrastructure operator Riot Platforms disclosed that it has signed a data center lease and service agreement with a frontier AI laboratory, providing 191 megawatts of critical IT load capacity. The initial lease term is 20 years, with an estimated contract revenue of approximately $9.1 billion. Bloomberg reported that the lessee is AI company Anthropic; Riot only referred to the client as a "leading frontier AI laboratory" in its announcement and regulatory filings, without disclosing the specific name.

This capacity will be deployed at Riot's Rockdale data center campus, using a custom-built Tier III data center solution. The project is planned for delivery in two phases, with the first 96 megawatts expected to be completed by December 2027, and the remaining 95 megawatts expected to be delivered by June 2028, at which point all 191 megawatts of capacity will be fully operational.

According to Riot's quarterly regulatory filing, the 20-year base lease term will begin after all capacity is delivered and is expected to run through June 2048. The approximately $9.1 billion corresponds to the estimated base rent over the initial lease term, and the agreement also grants the lessee two consecutive five-year renewal options; if both options are exercised, the total potential contract value would increase to approximately $16.1 billion.

Riot expects the agreement to contribute cumulative net operating income of $7.3 billion to $8.2 billion over the base lease term, with average annual net operating income of approximately $365 million to $411 million. To procure long-lead-time equipment and cover upfront development costs, Riot's project subsidiary has secured a $573 million bridge credit facility from Morgan Stanley, which is secured by project-related assets and is non-recourse to Riot Platforms' parent company.

This agreement is the second large-scale data center lease signed by Riot at the Rockdale campus. Including the previously signed 50-megawatt lease agreement with AMD, Riot's committed critical IT load capacity has increased to 241 megawatts. The first 25 megawatts of AMD's capacity have been delivered, and the additional 25 megawatts are still under construction, with 10 megawatts planned for delivery in November 2026 and the remaining 15 megawatts expected to be completed by May 2027.