Riot Platforms: The Miner That Became a Landlord

Where did Riot come from?

A rename. Bioptix, Inc., a Castle Rock, Colorado maker of veterinary diagnostics, became Riot Blockchain, Inc. on October 4, 2017, and its shares rose by half within the week and several-fold within three months; CNBC's investigation the following February found a company whose principal asset was the word in its name.^[1][2] The SEC issued a subpoena on April 9, 2018; that September the chief executive, John O'Rourke, resigned after being named in an unrelated $27 million market-manipulation case; a shareholder suit followed.^[3][4] The investigation closed on January 29, 2020 with no enforcement recommended, and the suit was dismissed with prejudice in August 2023.^[3][18] The company's principal office is still in Castle Rock; its executive chairman since May 2021 is Benjamin Yi, and its chief executive since February 8, 2021 is Jason Les, a director since 2017 and a former professional poker player – “Bitcoin positioned to disrupt the global financial system,” he said on appointment.^[32][5] Ten weeks later he bought Texas.

What did Riot buy, and where?

Rockdale first, then Corsicana, then whatever was next to them. On April 8, 2021 Riot agreed to acquire Whinstone US, the operator of the old Alcoa smelter site in Milam County, for $80 million in cash and 11.8 million shares – about $651 million at that day's price – and closed on May 26: “the most significant milestone in Riot's history.”^[6][7] Expanded to 700 developed megawatts by 2023, Rockdale is, in the company's filings, “believed to be the largest single Bitcoin mining facility in North America”; the ground it stands on Riot bought outright in January 2026 for $96 million, funded by selling about 1,080 bitcoin.^[18][34] On April 27, 2022 it announced a second campus in Navarro County: a gigawatt on 265 acres outside Corsicana, immersion-cooled, 400 megawatts in the first phase; the substation was energized April 18, 2024.^[8][21] Around them it bought what it had inherited: $185 million for Rhodium's 125 megawatts at Rockdale in April 2025, ending a hosting contract that “generated a gross loss of approximately $15 million” in 2024, and $20 million to settle a Japanese client's claim from the Whinstone era.^[30][36] It also bought Block Mining's Kentucky sites for $92.5 million in July 2024, and in 2024 tried and failed to buy Bitfarms, building a stake near a fifth of the company before settling for a board seat.^[24][23][25] The site's own history, from Alcoa to Bitmain to Whinstone, is on Rockdale, Texas and Bitcoin; where it sits among the state's mines is on the Texas Bitcoin mining map.

How does Riot make money from the grid?

By buying power at a fixed price and selling it back when the price is not. Riot's 10-K describes three blocks of power under long-term contract with TXU Energy at Rockdale – 130, 65, and 150 megawatts, fixed-price, running to 2027 and 2030 – with the right to “elect to sell that power in exchange for credits against future power costs,” beside participation in ERCOT's ancillary services and the four-coincident-peak program that sets its transmission bill.^[32] The company reports the results as “power credits”: $6.5 million in 2021, $27.3 million in 2022, $71.2 million in 2023 – about 38% of that year's mining revenue, or the equivalent of 2,497 bitcoin – $33.7 million in 2024 after the halving, and $56.7 million in 2025, “nearly $10,000 per Bitcoin mined.”^{[10][17][29][33]}August 2023 is the month everyone cites. Riot curtailed Rockdale by more than 95% at the peaks and booked $31.7 million against 333 bitcoin mined – “a landmark month,” Les said – and CNBC reported that Texas had paid it more to stop than it earned by mining.^[14] The filing itself gives the split the headline lost: $24.2 million was power sold under the TXU agreement, $7.4 million ERCOT demand response; Riot's response two days later called its ERCOT share “less than one percent of the program, which administered nearly $1 billion”; the Dallas Morning News put ERCOT's payments to Riot that summer at about $13 million.^[14][15][16] The grid operator's side of the arrangement – what it buys from the mines, and what its monitor thinks of the price – is on ERCOT and Bitcoin.

What is Riot's record with the counties and the Capitol?

One refusal, two abatements, one lawsuit won, two bills argued. Navarro County's commissioners voted unanimously on March 11, 2024 to deny Riot's reinvestment zone – it had sought 50% for ten years – with Commissioner David Brewer saying, “I don't think it's a good investment. They created a lot of controversy”; the Concerned Citizens of Navarro County had been protesting since June 2022 over water and noise, and Riot's David Schatz had told the town that “the only thing that we do as far as water consumption is just topping off our retention pond.”^[20][9][22] On October 15, 2024 the same court passed the abatement 3–2: ten years on new value, against a pledge of $640 million and 140 jobs.^[26] Milam County followed in February 2026 with 75% for ten years from 2028, 4–1, the dissenter calling it “too steep.”^[35] At the Capitol, Riot's research chief Pierre Rochard testified against Kolkhorst's SB 1751 on March 28, 2023 – “Bitcoin miners are the number 1 employer in Rockdale. Bitcoin miners are also the number 1 taxpayer to Rockdale ISD” – and for the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve in February 2025: “now is the perfect time to make a strategic investment.”^[12][13][44] In February 2024 Riot and the Texas Blockchain Council sued the Department of Energy over an emergency survey of miners' power use and had it withdrawn within a week.^[19] Its federal lobbying rose from $280,000 in 2022 to $1.16 million in 2024, led by Brian Morgenstern, a former White House deputy press secretary who sits on the council's board.^[43] In August 2026, when the Governor ordered an audit of every data center in the queue, Riot was the first company he announced had committed to comply, and Les published an open letter: “We support your commonsense principles of ratepayer protection, water stewardship.”^[41][42] The senator whose brake it fought is on Lois Kolkhorst and Bitcoin; the council it sued beside is on Lee Bratcher and Bitcoin; the reserve it argued for is on the Texas Strategic Bitcoin Reserve reference.

What is the pivot?

The conversion of a miner's power into a landlord's. On January 21, 2025 Riot announced a formal evaluation of about 600 megawatts at Corsicana for AI and high-performance computing, halted the second mining phase there, cut its hashrate target from 46.7 to 38.4 exahash, and trimmed $245 million of capital spending – “maximizing the potential of our assets,” Les said.^[27] On February 13 it seated three new directors “with constructive, independent input from each of Starboard Value LP and The D. E. Shaw Group,” the activist investors who had pushed for the turn.^[28]The tenants came a year later. On January 16, 2026 AMD signed for 25 megawatts at Rockdale over ten years with options, about $311 million; the second 25 followed in April, about $636 million in all.^[34][37] In April Riot signed a non-binding letter of intent for all 756 megawatts of Corsicana's planned data-center capacity with a single undisclosed tenant.^[37] And on August 10, 2026 it announced a twenty-year lease of 191 megawatts at Rockdale to “one of the world's leading frontier AI labs” – about $9.1 billion in base rent to June 2048, $16.1 billion with extensions, 96 megawatts by December 2027 and the rest by June 2028, financed in part by a $573 million bridge from Morgan Stanley. “A defining moment in our evolution into a leading developer of large-scale data centers,” Les said.^[39] Bloomberg identified the tenant as Anthropic; “Riot declined to comment and Anthropic didn't respond.”^[40] The company is still a miner – 44.4 exahash in mid-2026, about 4.6% of the network, 5,686 bitcoin mined in 2025 – but the hashrate grows in Kentucky now, and the Texas megawatts are being leased.^[39][32] The industry-wide version of the same turn is on the Texas Bitcoin mining map.

The honest counterweight: the shareholder's ledger

The third story the filings tell. Riot has reported a net loss in four of its last five years – $509.6 million in 2022, $49.5 million in 2023, $663.2 million in 2025, and $237.2 million in the second quarter of 2026 alone – and its one profitable year, 2024's $109.4 million, came from a new accounting rule that marks bitcoin to market rather than from operations.^{[10][17][33][39][29]} It has paid for its growth with paper: about 84 million shares in 2021 became about 378 million by 2026, four and a half times as many.^[38] It paid its chief executive $83,532,328 for 2024, most of it a $75.2 million performance-share grant, against a median employee's $58,875 – 1,419 to one – and cut him to $3.46 million with no long-term grant the next year “in direct response to 2025 Say-on-Pay feedback.”^[31][38] And it has sold the asset it exists to accumulate: 18,005 bitcoin at the end of 2025 became 11,380 by June 30, 2026, some 7,000 coins sold in six months to buy the Rockdale land and pour the frontier lab's foundations, with 5,821 of the remainder pledged against a loan.^[32][39] Set against it, the miner's case: the largest site on the continent, hashrate up nearly four-fold in three years, power at three cents, ten billion dollars of rent under contract, and a county that said no in March and yes in October.^[18][37][26] Two things this page does not say: the Granbury noise litigation is Marathon's, not Riot's, and the Core Scientific shareholders who rejected CoreWeave in October 2025 were not voting on anything of Riot's.^[45]

The fair reading is that Riot's Texas decade has been a single bet made three times – on cheap power at Rockdale, on the state paying for flexibility, and now on AI paying for capacity – and that the third bet is the first one whose counterparty is not the Texas grid or the Bitcoin price but a tenant with a twenty-year lease. Whether that makes Riot a better company or a different one, the shareholder who has been diluted four and a half times to fund it will find out at Corsicana.

Where does Riot stand today?

As of September 2026: 700 megawatts developed at Rockdale and 400 at Corsicana, 44.4 exahash, 11,380 bitcoin, 50 megawatts leased to AMD and 191 to a lab no one will name, a 756-megawatt letter of intent it has said converting to a lease is “a priority for the balance of 2026,” a market value near nine billion dollars, and a place in the Governor's audit it has volunteered for.^{[32][39][37][41]} The place it made is on Rockdale, Texas and Bitcoin; the grid that pays it is on ERCOT and Bitcoin; the regulator writing the rules for the load it is becoming is on the Public Utility Commission and Bitcoin. This page is the miner that learned to stop, and what it is building where the mine was.