The Rent Is $1.8 Million a Megawatt-Year

Former bitcoin miners have announced more than $70 billion of AI leases. Divided by megawatts and term, the market already has a price, and the strongest tenant pays a third less.

The Ecliptic · Issue No. 010 · September 17, 2026

$70bn+

AI and HPC contract value announced by public miners by mid-2026

$1.81M

per critical MW-year, mean of four large leases priced within about 5% of each other

32%

lower rent on the one direct investment-grade lease, AWS at Black Pearl

16.4 yr

gross-revenue payback at $20M/MW capex and the investment-grade rent, against a 15-year lease

The normalisation

Four landlords, four tenants, one price.

Contracted revenue per critical MW-year, $ millions. Chain Reaction estimates derived from disclosed contract value, critical IT load and initial term; extension options excluded. Not illustrative: every bar is a figure in the report.

Headline totals mix site size and term. Dividing each disclosed lease by **critical megawatts** and by **initial term** turns a scatter of deals into a rate. Hut 8's Texas lease clears **$1.86M** per MW-year, Applied Digital's CoreWeave lease **$1.83M**, Cipher's Fluidstack lease at Barber Lake **$1.79M** and Core Scientific's AMD lease **$1.76M**.

Independent negotiations converging inside about 5% is a market price, not coincidence: landlords need a rate that services $15–20M per MW of conversion capex, and tenants need one below the cost of waiting in an interconnection queue.
Once the rate is fixed, landlords stop competing on price and compete on speed to energization, the disclosure the sector still gives least consistently.
Two arrangements are left out on purpose: IREN–Microsoft includes 76,000 GPUs and is a compute contract, and Core Scientific–CoreWeave does not disclose critical MW comparably.

The discount

The best tenant pays the least, and credit is bought with equity.

Cipher's direct 15-year, 300 MW lease to AWS works out to **$1.22M** per MW-year, about **32.5%** below the cluster. Where the tenant is not investment grade, the deals have been made financeable by importing someone else's credit.

Google backstopped $1.4bn of Fluidstack's obligations at Cipher for warrants on roughly 24 million shares, about 5.4% pro forma.
It backstopped TeraWulf's Fluidstack arrangement for an approximately 8% stake.
A landlord can have a high rate or a strong tenant, not both. Net of the equity given up, the effective rate sits closer to the AWS rate than the headline suggests.
"Investment-grade tenant" in these disclosures often describes a backstop rather than the tenant itself: a different credit structure with a different failure mode.

The payback

At the top of 2026 build costs, the cheaper rent does not return the building.

Years of gross revenue needed to return build capex per MW, at the cluster rent and at the investment-grade rent. Chain Reaction estimates; capex benchmarks and rents as given in the report. No operating, financing or tax deductions.

Gross-revenue payback is capex per MW divided by rent per MW-year. It ignores power, staffing, financing and tax, so it is a strict **lower bound**. At **$20M per MW**, the investment-grade rent needs **16.4 years**, longer than its own 15-year lease.

At the $11.3M shell-and-core benchmark both rents repay comfortably, in 6.2 and 9.2 years.
Either the highest-capex builds are not being done at that rent, the tenant is funding part of the fit-out, or the underwriting leans on a residual value at year 15 that no operator has published a method for.
What would change the read: a disclosed lease outside roughly $1.6–2.0M per MW-year, or published conversion capex well below $15M per MW.

The Ecliptic, Issue No. 010, cover analysis, drawn from Chain Reaction SAT-0015 (August 7, 2026). Contract values, megawatts, terms, backstop terms and capex benchmarks are as reported in that report's cited sources; per-MW-year rents and paybacks are Chain Reaction estimates. Neither chart is illustrative.

Content is produced by AI systems with human editorial oversight.