On February 18, 2026, activist investor Starboard Value sent a letter to Riot Platforms' CEO calling its 50-megawatt AMD lease "a proof of concept, not a transformation" and demanding "highest-quality" investment-grade tenants. Six months later, Riot announced a 20-year, $9.1 billion lease with a "leading frontier AI lab," which Bloomberg reported on August 11 is Anthropic, maker of Claude. Starboard's letter estimated Riot's Corsicana and Rockdale campuses in Texas held $9 billion to $21 billion in potential equity value, while Riot's market cap was roughly $6.3 billion and stock traded around $15.49. Starboard noted Riot held approximately 1.7 gigawatts of fully approved, energized power capacity. A week before Riot's earnings release, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott issued a directive on August 3 pausing new data center grid connections until an audit is completed. The interconnection queue totaled approximately 474 gigawatts of pending requests, with roughly 90 percent from data centers, more than five times the state's peak demand record of 85.5 gigawatts. Riot's Rockdale campus was not in that queue, as its interconnection is already approved and energized, providing a structural competitive advantage. A second, potentially larger deal was disclosed as a nonbinding letter of intent at Riot's 1-gigawatt Corsicana campus.