Riot Platforms Signed a 20-Year Lease Without Naming the Tenant

本文另有中文版：一份 20 年的資料中心租約，沒有寫出租客是誰

On August 10, 2026, Riot Platforms filed a document with the SEC. It describes a 20-year data center lease expected to bring in $9.1 billion. The filing spells out the building type, the delivery schedule, and the financing structure in detail. One field is empty: the name of the tenant.

The same day, NVIDIA made an announcement of its own. It had brought together six financial institutions — Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs, and KKR — to mobilize more than $500 billion in third-party capital. The goal is to turn NVIDIA’s compute into what its own release calls an “Investable Asset Class.” Six names, six executives quoted on the record — nothing withheld there. What’s missing instead is whether any of it is signed as final.

Two companies, the same day, two different blanks. Riot’s filing gives the size, the term, and the delivery dates of a lease, and skips the tenant’s name. NVIDIA’s announcement gives the names of six capital providers and the scale of what it wants to raise. It skips whether the arrangement is contractually final.

The filing spells out the building. It skips the tenant’s name.

Riot’s own name for the deal is a “Data Center Lease and Services Agreement.” Not a compute purchase agreement, and not a colocation deal — neither phrase appears anywhere in the filing. Riot is the landlord, and its counterparty is called “the tenant” throughout.

The site is a new, build-to-suit Tier 3 facility at Riot’s existing Rockdale, Texas campus. The 191 MW figure is specified as “critical IT capacity,” not the facility’s total power draw. Delivery comes in two milestones, not a finer schedule: the initial 96 IT MW is expected in December 2027, and the full 191 IT MW by June 2028.

The dollar figures split into three, and each answers a different question. The filing’s own wording is “expected to generate approximately $9.1 billion in total initial contract revenue” over the 20-year initial term. That’s an estimate, not a locked-in or guaranteed sum. A separate “approximately $16.1 billion” is the total potential contract value only if the tenant exercises both five-year extension options — entirely at the tenant’s discretion.

A third figure measures something narrower still. The filing gives an estimated cumulative NOI range of $7.3 billion to $8.2 billion over the base lease term, and an estimated average annual NOI contribution of $365 million to $411 million. That’s net operating income: rental revenue after this facility’s own operating costs, not what Riot keeps after financing costs, taxes, or depreciation. None of the three figures should be divided by 20 to stand in for either of the others.

And across the filing, from the headline to the last line, the word “Anthropic” does not appear once.

The same announcement names a different tenant

Not naming a customer isn’t how this document treats every tenant. The same August 10 release carries a section headed “AMD Deployment Progress at Rockdale.” It reports on a different tenant’s buildout at the same campus. That tenant is named in full: “Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.,” with a note that the lease was announced on January 16, 2026. Later, the filing totals the two leases together: “Together with the AMD lease, the Company has contracted 241 MW of critical IT capacity with two of the most significant companies in the AI ecosystem.”

One tenant gets its legal name spelled out, and a section tracking construction progress. The other, in the same document, is “a leading frontier AI lab” and nothing more. The filing doesn’t explain the difference, and any claim about why — that the tenant demanded confidentiality, that Riot chose to withhold it — is a guess the document itself does not support.

There’s a gap in the financing section too, where Morgan Stanley is providing “a $573 million interim financing facility… to fund initial development costs while the investment-grade credit backstop is finalized.” That language implies the tenant carries investment-grade backing, without saying who is providing it. The lease itself surfaced as part of Riot’s Q2 2026 earnings 8-K, not as a standalone transaction announcement.

Bloomberg’s sources say Anthropic. Neither company has confirmed it.

The name attached to this deal in the press is Anthropic, and it traces to one chain. Bloomberg reported it, citing people familiar with the matter, and other outlets relayed that reporting — crypto.news headlined its version “Riot Platforms signs $9.1B AI deal reportedly with Anthropic.” Neither Riot nor Anthropic has confirmed or denied that identification.

Two more findings point the same direction, without resolving it. A full-text search of Riot’s SEC filings tied to this transaction turns up no mention of “Anthropic.” Anthropic’s own newsroom, as of this writing, lists no item referencing Riot, Rockdale, or this transaction — though that check covers only the newsroom’s front-page list, not every channel Anthropic might use.

So the record stands where it started: reporting attributed to Bloomberg says Anthropic, and neither party involved has said so on the record.

35 days earlier, TeraWulf put the customer’s name in its headline

On July 6, 2026 — 35 days before Riot’s filing — TeraWulf filed its own 8-K. The headline named its customer directly: “TeraWulf Announces Anthropic Lease at Justified Data Campus.” The filing describes a 20-year lease at a converted former Century Aluminum smelter site. The site is in Hawesville, Kentucky, and covers roughly 401 MW of critical IT load. It was “expected to generate approximately $19 billion of contracted revenue over the initial lease term” — roughly twice the revenue Riot expects, at more than twice the capacity. And it states the lease “is expected to be supported by an investment-grade credit.” Same hedge, “expected,” not a claim that the backing already exists.

The same TeraWulf release also describes a separate transaction: the sale of its 50.1% stake in the Abernathy joint venture to a group led by Fluidstack. That’s a different deal. Fluidstack is not an intermediary in the Anthropic lease.

What TeraWulf’s release demonstrates is that a public filing can name a customer directly, though it doesn’t explain Riot’s choice not to. And one filing can’t be read as proof that disclosure is the industry norm. It establishes that naming a tenant is possible, not that leaving one unnamed needs a special reason.

NVIDIA’s $500 billion is a target, signed only as a memorandum

NVIDIA’s August 10 announcement names its six partners and quotes an executive from each of them. The stated goal, in the release’s own words, is “to mobilize over $500 billion of third-party capital for the buildout of AI infrastructure over time.” Blackstone issued an identically titled release the same day, confirming its participation in the same joint announcement.

Two qualifiers sit inside that one sentence, and they’re easy to read past. The verb is “mobilize” — a target for capital NVIDIA hopes to bring in, not capital that has arrived. The release discloses no figure or commitment for NVIDIA’s own spending. And the target is to be reached “over time,” not all at once.

The legal status matters more than the headline number. What NVIDIA signed with the six institutions were memorandums of understanding — the release’s own term. The release states plainly: “These partnerships remain subject to execution of the final agreements.” $500 billion, in other words, is a target under a memorandum. It isn’t a number backed by binding commitments yet, let alone funds that have moved.

This also isn’t the AI Infrastructure Partnership renamed: AIP, formed by BlackRock, Global Infrastructure Partners, Microsoft, and MGX in September 2024, targets $30 billion in equity capital, or up to $100 billion including leverage. That figure and this week’s $500 billion mobilization target are different measures and shouldn’t be compared directly. BlackRock Chairman and CEO Larry Fink’s quote in NVIDIA’s release calls the new arrangement a deepening of the relationship “including through the AI Infrastructure Partnership.” AIP is one channel inside an existing relationship there, not the new platform’s predecessor.

NVIDIA calls compute an asset class. It doesn’t say what secures the credit.

The opening clause of the subhead NVIDIA put on its own release states the thesis outright: “New Financing Platforms Turn NVIDIA Compute and Full-Stack AI Infrastructure Into an Investable Asset Class for Global Capital” — NVIDIA’s own language, not a commentator’s gloss.

Jensen Huang’s quote makes the case for why compute qualifies. “In AI, compute is revenue.” NVIDIA compute, he says, is “broadly adopted, flexible across models and workloads, fungible and transferable across customers and operators, and continuously improved through CUDA software — extending its useful life and improving its economics over time.” That’s “why we are bringing the world’s leading long-term capital providers together to independently underwrite AI infrastructure” — underwrite, not lend against or collateralize. Apollo President Jim Zelter frames the same claim differently: “Modern compute has emerged as a scarce, mission-critical asset class with compelling investment characteristics.”

Calling compute an investable asset and disclosing what specifically secures a loan against it are two different claims. The release contains zero instances of “collateral,” “pledge,” “asset-backed,” “ABS,” “SPV,” or “securitization.” The one word that comes close is “backed,” appearing once, in Goldman Sachs Chairman and CEO David Solomon’s quote: “we’re excited for the new opportunity to create a market for credit backed by NVIDIA compute.”

The verb there is “create” — a market NVIDIA and its partners want to build, not one that already exists. Reading that sentence as proof of an existing compute-collateralized lending structure claims more than the document says. But claiming NVIDIA never mentioned securing credit against compute goes too far the other way: Solomon’s line does exactly that, on the record. The accurate version sits between the two: the release doesn’t disclose collateral, security, or a special-purpose vehicle. It describes wanting to build a market for credit backed by NVIDIA compute, with the mechanism undisclosed and the final agreements unsigned.

CoreWeave already borrows against GPUs — a different deal, three years earlier

Borrowing against AI hardware already has a precedent. The deal most often cited as the first of its kind predates this one by three years. In August 2023, CoreWeave borrowed $2.3 billion secured by its NVIDIA H100 chips, in a facility led by Magnetar Capital and Blackstone.

Separately, on March 31, 2026, CoreWeave closed an $8.5 billion delayed-draw term loan — DDTL 4.0. That one is described as the first high-performance-computing-infrastructure-secured term loan to receive investment-grade ratings, from Moody’s (A3) and DBRS (A low). The two CoreWeave transactions are different deals, nearly three years apart, and only the second carries the investment-grade description.

Blackstone was among the lenders on CoreWeave’s 2023 facility, and it’s also one of the six institutions in NVIDIA’s August 10 announcement. The public record connects those two facts and nothing more.

A separate report says NVIDIA’s Ohio backstop shrank. Neither company has confirmed it.

A different story, from a different source, surfaced the same week. The Wall Street Journal reported on August 14, 2026, citing people familiar with the matter, that NVIDIA’s financial backstop for OpenAI’s Ohio data center project had shrunk. The backstop covers lease and construction debt for the project’s first phase, and the reported cut runs from a previously planned roughly $250 billion to under $120 billion.

The project’s developer is SB Energy, a SoftBank subsidiary, and OpenAI is the tenant. The site is a former U.S. Department of Energy uranium-enrichment facility in Pike County, Ohio, known as the PORTS Technology Campus. Neither NVIDIA nor OpenAI has publicly confirmed or denied the reported figures.

Nine AI-infrastructure deals, six different kinds of money

Line up the past year’s AI-infrastructure deals that disclosed dollar figures, and the instruments turn out different enough that the numbers shouldn’t be summed or ranked against each other.

One is an equity-investment letter of intent: NVIDIA’s planned investment of up to $100 billion in OpenAI, released in tranches as each gigawatt of capacity is deployed. It was signed as a September 2025 letter of intent, and NVIDIA’s own CFO was still calling it non-final as of December 2025.

Another is a compute purchase paired with warrants. AMD’s deal with OpenAI covers 6 GW of GPU capacity, with warrants for up to 160 million AMD shares at a $0.01 strike price, vesting against procurement milestones, from October 2025. A third is a joint venture’s own capital commitment: Stargate — OpenAI, SoftBank, Oracle, and MGX — with a stated $500 billion over four years and $100 billion to be deployed immediately.

A fourth category is each hyperscaler’s own 2026 capital-expenditure guidance, and the sourcing strength varies by company. Meta’s $130 billion to $145 billion comes verbatim from its own quarterly filing. Microsoft’s roughly $190 billion, Alphabet’s $195 billion to $205 billion, and Amazon’s roughly $220 billion are all sourced to media accounts of earnings calls, not to primary filings read directly. How Alphabet funds that spending is a separate story, examined in Alphabet’s Strongest Quarter on Paper Was Also Its First Cash-Flow-Negative One.

A fifth is a straightforward compute purchase: Anthropic’s agreement with Google for multiple gigawatts of TPU capacity, coming online starting in 2027. A sixth is a mixed structure, carrying two figures that shouldn’t be merged into one. Anthropic is committing more than $100 billion over ten years to AWS cloud spending. Separately, Amazon is making a $5 billion equity investment in Anthropic, with up to $20 billion more.

Letter of intent, warrant, joint-venture capex, earnings-call guidance, purchase agreement, equity stake — six different instruments, wearing similar-looking dollar signs. They don’t add up to one number, and they don’t rank against each other.

Back to where this started. Riot’s filing spells out the size, the term, and the delivery schedule of a 20-year lease, and leaves out who is responsible for paying the rent. NVIDIA’s announcement names six financial institutions and states an ambition to turn compute into an investable asset class, and leaves out whether what it signed with them is final. $500 billion remains a target to be mobilized over time. The two documents are blank in different places: one is missing a tenant’s name, the other a signed agreement.

Sources

Primary documents

• Riot Platforms, Inc., Riot Platforms Reports Second Quarter 2026 Financial Results and Strategic Highlights (8-K Exhibit 99.1), August 10, 2026
• TeraWulf Inc., TeraWulf Announces Anthropic Lease at Justified Data Campus (8-K Exhibit 99.1), July 6, 2026
• NVIDIA Newsroom, NVIDIA Partners With Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs and KKR to Establish AI Compute Infrastructure Financing Platforms to Mobilize Over $500 Billion of Third-Party Capital, August 10, 2026
• Blackstone press release (identically titled to NVIDIA’s joint announcement), August 10, 2026
• OpenAI/NVIDIA letter-of-intent announcement; AMD/OpenAI partnership announcement; Stargate project announcement; Anthropic/Google partnership announcement; Anthropic/Amazon partnership announcement (each company’s own release)
• Meta Platforms Q2 2026 earnings release (Exhibit 99.1, SEC filing)

Reporting

• The Wall Street Journal, August 14, 2026 exclusive, relayed by CNBC, Reuters, and others — reduction in NVIDIA’s Ohio data center financial backstop
• Bloomberg, relayed by crypto.news and other outlets — reporting on the identity of Riot’s tenant
• CNBC, Forbes, TechTimes, and other financial outlets — CoreWeave compute-secured financing and Microsoft/Alphabet/Amazon 2026 capex guidance