Derate #001 / Public research / As of June 2026
Riot Rockdale: headline MW, tenant MW, and the first-slice problem.
Riot's Rockdale campus is a real AI/HPC conversion asset, not a promotional placeholder. The site has 700 MW of reported gross/developed power, a 200-acre owned land position, water and fiber disclosures, and AMD as an anchor tenant. But gross site power, estimated critical IT ceiling, tenant path, contracted capacity, and delivered capacity are different units. This note keeps them separate.
The Waterfall
Reported by Riot for Rockdale. This is the top of the funnel, not sellable IT load.
Textbook 1.20-1.35 PUE implies ~520-580 MW. Cipher's disclosed 244 MW gross / 168 MW critical IT ratio implies ~480 MW. Carry the wider range.
50 MW contracted, 50 MW remaining reserved option, and up to 100 MW conditional first-priority right.
25 MW initial lease plus April 2026 amendment for an additional 25 MW.
Riot disclosed 5 MW delivered in January 2026 and the remaining initial 20 MW anticipated in May 2026.
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What is real
Rockdale has the hardest scarce input: large-scale power. Riot also removed a land-control question by acquiring the 200-acre parcel. AMD's lease is a real validation event because it converts part of the campus from mining infrastructure into contracted critical IT load.
What remains unproved
The remaining campus is not yet evidenced as tenant-contracted AI/HPC capacity. The unanswered questions are building-specific cooling suitability, redundancy, uptime, network routes, delivery cadence, and whether later MW blocks require a materially different capex regime.
Building Composition Matters
Seven buildings, not one homogeneous box
Riot describes Rockdale as seven buildings: five air-cooled buildings representing roughly 500 MW and two immersion-cooled buildings representing roughly 200 MW. A conversion derate should not treat those buildings as interchangeable.
The missing inference
The key unresolved field is which building type hosts AMD's initial deployment. Air-cooled shell conversion, immersion-building reuse, and new high-density liquid-cooled work imply different retrofit costs, schedules, and tenant density ceilings.
Site Control Was Assembled, Not Assumed
Riot disclosed that legacy Rhodium hosting contracts generated an approximately $15 million gross loss in FY2024.
Riot's $185 million Rhodium asset acquisition terminated the legacy hosting contracts and moved 125 MW of Rockdale capacity under Riot and subsidiaries.
Riot bought the 200-acre Rockdale parcel, funded by selling approximately 1,080 bitcoin from treasury.
Finding: "site control proved" is correct only after the 2025-26 cleanup. The campus became cleaner through a bankruptcy-linked asset transaction plus a ground-lease buyout, not because those encumbrances never existed.
AMD Terms, Updated
10-year initial term; three five-year extensions; approximately $311 million initial contract value.
Original path to 200 MW total capacity for AMD.
AMD exercised 25 MW of the existing option, leaving 50 MW reserved capacity.
50 MW contracted, 50 MW remaining option, plus conditional first-priority right for up to 100 MW in at least 50 MW increments.
Riot's Q1 materials show roughly $636 million of 10-year revenue and $510 million of NOI, or about $51 million average annual NOI.
Capex Comp: Do Not Extrapolate The First Slice
Riot Rockdale
Riot disclosed $89.8 million of retrofit capex for the initial 25 MW AMD deployment, or roughly $3.6 million per critical IT MW. That first phase uses existing Rockdale infrastructure.
Cipher Barber Lake
Cipher's Fluidstack transaction disclosed estimated project costs of $9-11 million per critical IT MW for 168 MW of critical IT load supported by up to 244 MW gross capacity.
Finding: the first slice is the cheap slice. A $3.6M/MW retrofit disclosure should not be applied across Rockdale's remaining campus without proving scope, density, cooling design, tenant fit-out responsibilities, and redundancy requirements.
Company calibration: Riot's own Corsicana design trajectory points the same way. Management described an updated 168 MW critical IT building designed for densities above 1,000 watts per square foot and configurable for 100% liquid cooling, a different cost regime than a first retrofit in an existing Rockdale shell.
Funding The Next MW Blocks
At Riot's disclosed first-slice cost
A 25 MW block at $3.6M per critical IT MW costs about $90 million. At March 31, 2026, Riot had 9,877 unencumbered bitcoin after collateral, worth about $674 million at Riot's disclosed $68,222 bitcoin price. That treasury alone funds roughly 7.5 more 25 MW blocks before debt, tenant funding, or additional bitcoin sales.
At a broader liquid-cooled comp
A 25 MW block at $9-11M per critical IT MW costs about $225-275 million. The same unencumbered bitcoin treasury funds about 2.4-3.0 blocks. Riot's unrestricted cash balance of about $205.6 million funds less than one 25 MW block under this cost regime.
Guardrail: this runway is portfolio-wide, not Rockdale-specific. Rockdale competes with Corsicana, operating needs, collateral requirements, and other corporate uses for every treasury dollar.
Sensitivity: at $50K / $68.2K / $90K BTC, the 9,877 unencumbered BTC are worth about $494M / $674M / $889M. That implies about 5.5 / 7.5 / 9.9 blocks at $90M per 25 MW block, or about 1.8-2.2 / 2.4-3.0 / 3.2-4.0 blocks at $225-275M per block. Selling BTC to build also thins the cushion around the collateralized BTC; facility LTV and margin provisions are not modeled here.
Finding: the 650 MW bridge is not just a construction question. It is a financing question: treasury bitcoin sales, lease-backed debt, tenant-funded fit-out, and true $/MW scope determine how much of Rockdale can move from gross power into contracted critical IT load.
Debt anchor: the expanded AMD lease implies about $51 million of average annual stabilized NOI. Illustratively, sizing that NOI at 1.4-1.8x DSCR and an 8-10% amortizing debt-service constant supports roughly $280-455 million of lease-backed debt. Caveats: lenders size against the initial 10-year lease term, not extension options, and NOI ramps with delivered capacity rather than arriving on day one.
Slippage Table
Riot disclosed that the first 5 MW of critical IT load was delivered in January 2026.
No later public filing reviewed here updates this milestone beyond the Q1 disclosure.
Riot's Q1 presentation and Data Center Dynamics coverage describe the expansion phases as completing through May 2027.
Open Diligence Questions
- What is the defensible Rockdale critical-IT ceiling after PUE, redundancy, cooling, and non-IT loads?
- Which Rockdale building type hosts AMD, and what does that imply for the marginal cost of the next building?
- How much of the remaining campus can reuse existing shells versus requiring purpose-built high-density data center work?
- Does the $3.6M/MW initial retrofit include the same scope that investors would compare against $9-11M/MW greenfield or deeper conversion projects?
- How many additional 25 MW blocks can Riot finance at first-slice cost versus liquid-cooled project cost?
- What mining-revenue opportunity cost and decommissioning logistics attach to each MW converted away from active hash-rate operations?
- What delivery evidence exists after the May 2026 initial-deployment milestone?
- What network routes, SLAs, operating history, and tenant fit-out responsibilities apply to later phases?
Core Assumption
The critical-IT ceiling assumes conversion of Rockdale's existing mining load into AI/HPC capacity. Rockdale remains an active mining facility, so each converted MW carries mining-revenue opportunity cost, operational sequencing risk, and decommissioning logistics in addition to construction capex.
Data Quality Note
Public site databases can misplace the anchor fact. As of this review, at least one third-party data-center database associated AMD's 25-to-50 MW expansion with Riot's Corsicana campus. Riot's own release, Q1 materials, and subsequent coverage place the AMD lease at Rockdale. This is exactly why the first step is source-level normalization rather than copying campus-level summaries.