Riot Platforms spent $90,631 to mine a bitcoin last quarter and booked it at $71,667. Fully loaded, including depreciation on the machines doing the mining, it lost money on every coin it produced, for the second quarter running. That explains everything else the company is doing.
Riot is a bitcoin miner that has stopped wanting to be one. In just over six months it signed 241 megawatts of contracted AI data-centre capacity, wrote off mining equipment to make room, and sold nearly ten thousand bitcoin to fund the build.
What the quarter showed
Second-quarter revenue was $174.2m against a net loss of $237.2m and adjusted EBITDA of negative $69.7m, on 1,587 bitcoin mined from an average operating hashrate of 37.2 EH/s.
One nuance is usually reported wrongly. Miners now carry bitcoin at fair value, so the price swings through the income statement, and it is tempting to dismiss the loss as non-cash remeasurement. This quarter that is false: of the $74.6m fair-value charge, about $72.1m was realised losses on coins Riot sold below cost. The loss was depreciation, overheads, a $28.0m impairment and selling cheaply — not a paper mark.
| Share price, close 4 September 2026 | $21.80 |
| Market capitalisation | ~$8.18bn |
| Revenue | $174.2m |
| Net loss | $237.2m |
| Adjusted EBITDA | −$69.7m |
| Bitcoin mined | 1,587 |
| Cost to mine, excluding depreciation | $49,912 |
| Cost to mine, including depreciation | $90,631 |
| Bitcoin held, 30 June | 11,380 (51% pledged) |
| Combined power cost | 3.6 c/kWh |
| Contracted AI capacity | 241 MW |
The pivot is real, and unevenly evidenced
Two leases are signed. AMD, named in the filings, took 25 MW at Rockdale on a ten-year term, took delivery on schedule in January and May, then exercised an option for another 25 MW. That sits on the balance sheet as $633.0m of future minimum base rent — audited, not projected. A tenant expanding after delivery is the strongest signal there is.
The second is larger and vaguer. In August Riot signed a 191 MW, twenty-year build-to-suit lease with what the filings call “one of the world’s leading frontier AI labs”, carrying about $9.1bn of base rent through 2048. Management declined to name the tenant and we will not guess. First delivery is December 2027.
That date is the risk. Fifteen months of construction stand between here and the first dollar, funded by a $573m Morgan Stanley bridge maturing in December 2026 on the later of two conflicting filings, against management commentary of $2.1bn to $2.3bn of capital expenditure. Riot describes the permanent financing as still being finalised.
The contracts are audited. The fifteen months between now and the first payment are not.
The bear case
Mining loses money fully loaded, with $472.1m of miner depreciation still to run through the accounts. The bitcoin stack fell from 18,005 to 11,380 coins in six months, and 5,821 of what remains is pledged to Coinbase, so barely half is free. Riot crystallised $113.2m of losses selling into weakness.
Dilution deserves more care than it usually gets. Historically it was severe: up 62.6 per cent since the end of 2023, and 49.4 per cent in 2024 alone. But Riot drew nothing on its $500m at-the-market programme in the first half of 2026, raised no equity or debt at all, and the share count fell in the second quarter. The live risk is not a drip. It is the 0.75 per cent convertible due 2030, now convertible at holders’ option with the shares well above its $14.86 conversion price, which Riot intends to settle in stock — about 40m shares, or 10.7 per cent of the count.
And Corsicana, the one-gigawatt campus behind most bullish write-ups, is covered by a non-binding letter of intent, as Riot’s own chief executive said.
The bull case
Energised, approved power at scale is the scarce asset in AI infrastructure, and Riot has 1,292 MW of it, built as a miner and up from 1,165 MW a year ago, including an approved interconnection at Rockdale. The power position is distinctive: 3.6 cents per kWh combined, and $31.1m of curtailment and demand-response credits in the first half, up 93 per cent, which cut second-quarter cash cost per bitcoin by 11 per cent while bitcoin was falling.
The balance sheet is not stressed: $3.26bn of assets against $1.07bn of liabilities, $548.9m of cash, and debt dominated by a 0.75 per cent convertible not due until 2030. Engineering revenue tripled to $37.3m, the in-house capability that hit the AMD dates.
The honest summary is that this is no longer a bitcoin miner and not yet a data-centre company. At roughly $8.2bn the market is paying for the second on contracts that begin delivering in December 2027. Bitcoin at $79,405 covers Riot’s cash costs comfortably and its fully loaded costs not at all. Everything rests on a build that has not happened yet.
Sources, retrieved 7 September 2026: Riot’s 10-Q for the quarter ended 30 June 2026 and its earnings release, both filed 10 August 2026; the 8-K of 14 August 2026; the FY2025 10-K; SEC EDGAR company facts; CoinGecko; Yahoo Finance. Financials are in dollars because Riot is a US-listed issuer. Markets were shut for Labor Day, so the price is Friday’s close. Contested: the 10-Q dates the Morgan Stanley facility to 15 October 2026 and the 8-K to 31 December; the drawn amount is undisclosed; the 191 MW tenant is unnamed and press identifications have no primary support; capital expenditure guidance and the Corsicana letter of intent exist only in earnings-call commentary; and Riot stopped publishing monthly production updates in 2026, so no July or August figure exists. Not a recommendation to buy, sell or hold any security.