Riot Platforms has bought the 200 acres of Milam County, Texas land underneath its Rockdale site for $96.0 million, and has signed its first data center lease there with AMD for 25 MW of critical IT load. Riot had previously operated the site under a long term ground lease.
The Data Center Lease and Services Agreement runs an initial term of 10 years and is expected to generate approximately $311.0 million in contract revenue. Three five year extension options follow, which would bring total expected contract revenue to approximately $1.0 billion if all are exercised. It is a modified gross lease with annual escalators.
Delivery is fast because nothing is being built from scratch. Riot has started retrofitting one of its existing buildings, with capacity handed to AMD in two phases, the first in January 2026 and final completion in May 2026.
Retrofit capital expenditure for that initial deployment is $89.8 million, which Riot states as $3.6 million per MW of critical IT load. The company expects the lease to contribute an average of $25 million per year in net operating income.
AMD holds an expansion option for a further 75 MW and a right of first refusal on another 100 MW at the same site. Exercising both would take its leased capacity at Rockdale to 200 MW, which is eight times the initial deployment and would require considerably more than one retrofitted building.
The site itself is the asset being sold here. Rockdale has a 700 MW interconnection to the grid, a dedicated water supply and fiber connectivity, and Riot says it intends to convert the full 700 MW of gross capacity to data center use. Across Rockdale and its Corsicana site, roughly 100 miles apart, the company now owns and manages over 1,100 acres and 1.7 GW of power capacity.
Funding for the land purchase came entirely from the sale of approximately 1,080 bitcoin held on Riot's balance sheet. Anyone assessing counterparty durability should register that the landlord paid for its real estate with the asset it also mines.
"At AMD, advancing high-performance computing and AI requires partners that can match our pace and scale," said Hasmukh Ranjan, CIO of AMD. What the announcement does not give is the operating specification behind that sentence. There is no disclosed rack density, no cooling approach, no PUE commitment and no statement of what power terms apply beyond the escalators, and those are the numbers that decide whether a converted mining hall can carry accelerated compute. A published one line diagram, a cooling design and the contracted power price would settle it.
Interconnection capacity is now the scarce input in this market, and Rockdale shows what a fully energized 700 MW position is worth when a tenant needs racks live inside five months. Buyers weighing a converted mining site against a purpose built hall should ask for the retrofit specification rather than the capex per MW, because $3.6 million per MW says how cheap the shell was and nothing about what density it will hold.
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