Jason Les Announced $9.1 Billion. He Never Said Whose.
Riot Platforms filed its Q2 2026 earnings release as an SEC 8-K exhibit on August 10, 2026, disclosing a 20-year lease at its Rockdale, Texas campus for 191 MW of critical IT capacity, built to Tier 3 specification for what the filing calls only "a leading frontier AI lab." Total contract revenue over the initial term running through June 2048 comes to about $9.1 billion, rising to as much as $16.1 billion if two five-year extension options are both exercised.
Riot's own numbers project cumulative net operating income of $7.3 billion to $8.2 billion over the base term, averaging $365 million to $411 million a year. Delivery is phased: an initial 96 IT MW online by December 2027, the full 191 MW by June 2028, built on interconnection capacity Riot says is already fully approved. CEO Jason Les used the earnings release to describe combined commitments across two tenants - not to name either one.
Bloomberg Filled In The Name Riot Left Blank
Within hours of the filing, Bloomberg reported, citing people familiar with the matter, that the unnamed tenant is Anthropic. The Block, CoinDesk and crypto.news each independently reported the same identification, citing Bloomberg's sourcing or their own. RIOT shares jumped more than 25% after-hours and in pre-market trading on the combination of the disclosed number and the reported name.
What none of those reports carry is a statement from either company. Riot's SEC filing never uses the word "Anthropic." Anthropic has issued no public confirmation. The stock move priced in a specific counterparty that only anonymous sourcing, not any regulatory disclosure or company statement, has actually supplied.
The Landlord's Own Financing Is Also Not Finished
Buried further into the same release is a second open question, this one about Riot rather than its tenant. The initial development costs at Rockdale are being funded by a $573 million facility from Morgan Stanley, which Riot's own release describes as interim financing "while the investment-grade credit backstop is finalized." In plain terms: the permanent financing behind a 20-year, $9.1-to-16.1-billion commitment does not exist yet, either.
That detail matters for anyone treating the $9.1 billion figure as settled. A 20-year lease is only as durable as the balance sheet standing behind it on both sides, and Riot has told investors, in its own words, that its side is currently a bridge facility awaiting permanent replacement. The tenant's name is unconfirmed; the landlord's long-term funding is unfinished. Both gaps sit underneath the same headline number.
For Anyone Pricing Risk Off This Deal, Read the Filing First
This is Riot's second tenant at Rockdale. AMD signed in January 2026 for 25 MW, delivered on time and on budget this quarter, with a second 25 MW block under construction. Combined with the new lease, Riot now counts 241 MW under contract and, in Les's own words, "with two of the most significant companies in the AI ecosystem," about $9.8 billion in combined long-term contracted revenue.
For a European enterprise buyer weighing exposure to this compute capacity, or an investor sizing up Riot as a landlord, the disclosed record supports fewer certainties than the headline suggests: no confirmed tenant name, and no confirmed permanent financing behind the lease that tenant supposedly signed. Both facts are knowable today, straight from the filing, without waiting on a press leak or an earnings call to fill in the rest.
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