Riot Platforms has joined a number of crypto-miner competitors in shifting focus to artificial intelligence data centers over the last year. An activist investor wants the company to move more quickly.
Investment firm Starboard Value, which has a 3.4% stake in Riot, sent a letter to Riot CEO Jason Les and Executive Chairman Benjamin Yi on Wednesday requesting a "renewed sense of urgency" to secure AI and high-performance computing deals at its facilities.
"AI/HPC companies have announced ambitious plans to scale their capacity exponentially over the next few years," the firm wrote. "In such a dynamic and rapidly evolving AI/HPC demand environment, Riot must urgently seize this extraordinary opportunity."
Riot shares jumped 8.8% to $15.93 on Wednesday. The company didn't immediately respond to Barron's request for comment.
The letter comes a month after Riot reached a deal worth up to $1 billion to lease data center capacity to Advanced Micro Devices. The chip maker will use 25 megawatts of capacity at Riot's Rockdale data center in Milam County, Texas, under a 10-year, $311 million contract with three five-year extension options.
"It is a small proof of concept deal," Starboard said of the transaction. "We, like you, expect significantly more."
Riot has what every data-center tenant wants: Power. Riot's two sites in Texas, near Dallas and Austin, comprise 1.7 gigawatts of available capacity.
Starboard argued that Riot faces no impediments in building advanced data centers on these sites and that they are, in fact, better than sites where competitors have announced deals. The facilities should also be attractive to so-called AI hyperscalers, rather than riskier, non-investment-grade tenants, given their locations near major metropolitan areas, the firm said.
Riot could generate $1.6 billion in annual earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization if it is able to monetize its full power capacity at prices in line with recent data center contracts, Starboard estimates.
Riot shares have lagged those of its peers making the pivot from crypto to AI. The stock has climbed 38% over the last year -- nothing to sneeze at -- but TeraWulf, Cipher Mining, and Hut 8 are all up by triple digits.
"Although this underperformance is frustrating, we believe that Riot is better positioned to do higher-quality deals than its peers," Starboard wrote.
Factoring in the costs to build out Riot's remaining data-center capacity, the firm pegs the potential equity value of the company's data centers at $9 billion to $21 billion. As of Tuesday, Riot had a market capitalization of $5.5 billion.