The company funded the acquisition with its own cash. In December, Riot sold a record 1,080 BTC, while mining 460 BTC during the month.
The transaction transferred ownership of land that Riot had previously held under a long-term lease.
Under an agreement with Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), Riot will provide its partner with a phased rollout of AI compute capacity between January and May 2026.
As part of future expansions, Riot will be able to offer AMD access to up to 200 MW of power. The company also has an additional 700 MW of contracted capacity.
“I am pleased to report the significant progress we have made, which expands our fully approved data center power portfolio to 1.7 GW and, through the execution of our lease agreement with AMD, firmly establishes Rockdale as a leading development hub. This partnership validates Riot’s infrastructure, expansion capabilities, site attractiveness, available power capacity, and our ability to deliver innovative solutions to meet the needs of premier tenants,” said Riot CEO Jason Les.
CleanSpark joins the race
Bitcoin miner CleanSpark has entered into a definitive agreement to purchase an approximately 181-hectare (447-acre) land parcel in Brazoria County, Texas.
The acquisition is expected to enable the company to expand compute capacity by up to 600 MW in total. The deal is scheduled to close in the first quarter of 2026.
“Demand for scalable, AI-native compute continues to accelerate, while access to transmission-level power in strategically located regions is becoming increasingly constrained,” said CleanSpark Chairman and CEO Matt Schultz.
CoreWeave scales up
AI infrastructure provider CoreWeave has deployed 16,000 GPUs at a Texas data center to support services for OpenAI, according to The Information.
The equipment installation at the facility in Denton, Texas, began later than planned, with the delay attributed to issues faced by a third-party contractor.
Under current plans, the data center — owned by CoreWeave’s partner, Bitcoin miner Core Scientific — will be converted from a bitcoin mining facility into an AI-focused data center. The total investment is estimated at approximately $6.1 billion.
From an infrastructure perspective, this cluster of deals clearly shows how former bitcoin-mining hubs are being repositioned as strategic assets for the AI economy. Companies like Riot, CleanSpark, and CoreWeave are no longer betting on hash rate alone — they are monetizing power access, land, and grid proximity, which now matter more than the underlying workload. The competitive edge is shifting from crypto cycles to long-term control over energy and compute, and Texas is becoming one of the key battlegrounds for that transition.
