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Riot (RIOT) and Hut 8 (HUT) Sell Thousands of Bitcoin to Fund AI Ventures, Share Buybacks
Two of the largest public bitcoin miners reported third-quarter results on Wednesday, and both used the occasion to confirm they have been selling the asset they were built to accumulate.
Riot Platforms has sold 20,264 BTC this year for about $1.5 billion, and Hut 8 has sold 3,102 BTC since July to fund $250 million in share repurchases.
The sales serve different ends. Riot is paying for data center construction; Hut 8 is buying back its own stock. Riot ended September with 2,418 BTC, worth about $202 million at the quarter-end price of $83,554. It held 18,005 at the start of the year.
Hut 8 reported about 16,787 BTC across the parent and its majority-owned American Bitcoin on Sept. 30, worth $1.4 billion, of which $697.4 million was attributable to Hut 8 itself, before October sales reduced the parent’s share.
Riot: the treasury becomes a construction budget
Riot’s selling has been steady all year. It sold 3,778 bitcoin in the first quarter, about 2.5 times its production, then 4,300 in the second and a further 12,186 in the third. The proceeds funded data center work and the full repayment of a $200 million Coinbase credit facility, which released all pledged coins. The company raised no equity in 2026.
The reason arrived with the results. Riot signed a 15-year triple-net lease with an unnamed “Frontier AI Lab” for the whole of its Corsicana, Texas campus, 910 MW of critical IT capacity, worth about $28 billion over the initial term and $1.8 billion in average annual rent.
Combined with its AMD contract and an earlier Rockdale lease with the same tenant, Riot has leased 1,151 MW for about $38 billion. CEO Jason Les put expected net operating income above $2 billion a year at full deployment, according to the company release.
The structure limits Riot’s outlay. Capital cost is about $6 million per MW, half a typical Tier 3 build; Riot funds $2 million of that for site work and power, and the tenant covers the rest, to be reimbursed from non-recourse project debt after each phase is delivered. Delivery runs from September 2027 to July 2028.
Mining continues in the background. Riot produced 1,637 BTC in the quarter at an average cost of $39,265 before depreciation, but mining revenue fell 28% to $116 million as the average price dropped to $70,855 from $114,361 a year earlier.
Total revenue was $181.4 million, flat year over year, with data center and engineering income filling the gap.
Hut 8: bitcoin out, shares in
Hut 8’s sales went to shareholders rather than contractors. It sold about 954 bitcoin for $74.8 million in the quarter and about 2,148 BTC for $175.4 million in October, retiring 3.3 million shares for a combined $250 million.
On Nov. 2 the board raised the repurchase authorization to $1 billion. CEO Asher Genoot said shareholders “now own a larger share of a growing platform following share repurchases funded with Bitcoin from our balance sheet.”
The company says its data centers will not need that treasury. Hut 8 closed a $1.07 billion senior secured revolving credit facility, undrawn at quarter-end, and expects River Bend and Beacon Point to be financed at the project level without parent equity or recourse debt.
Beacon Point’s tenant doubled its commitment with a second 352 MW lease, bringing contracted value across the campus to about $19.6 billion and across the portfolio to $26.6 billion.
Hut 8 also agreed to buy two energized West Texas sites with up to 230 MW out of a Chapter 11 process for up to $180 million.
The quarter’s net income of $189.5 million rested on $413.8 million in gains on digital assets, most of them unrealized. Revenue fell to $71.1 million from $83.5 million as the company sold its traditional cloud business and shifted mining into American Bitcoin, the Trump-family-backed venture in which Hut 8 holds a majority stake. Adjusted EBITDA, which now excludes bitcoin mark-to-market, was $33 million.
Hut 8’s stock plunged 17% so far today while Riot’s stock was up around 13%.
This post Riot (RIOT) and Hut 8 (HUT) Sell Thousands of Bitcoin to Fund AI Ventures, Share Buybacks first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.
