On July 27, 2026, Core Scientific (NASDAQ: CORZ) executed lease agreements covering 377 MW of critical IT capacity with AMD at its Pecos, Texas; Muskogee, Oklahoma; and Hunt County, Texas sites, plus 152 MW with an unnamed “Neocloud” at Auburn, Alabama and Dalton Phase 3, Georgia. Each lease runs fifteen years with three five-year renewal options. The AMD leases also grant AMD the right to reserve an additional 1,925 MW through December 28, 2028 — the arithmetic behind the “up to 2.5 gigawatts” headline in the two companies’ joint announcement of July 28. Core Scientific issued AMD a warrant for up to 30 million shares at $23.47, of which roughly 6.5 million vested on signing.
Credit where it is due: Stocktwits surfaced the market reaction to the partnership, and that pointer led us to the underlying filings, where the actual terms sit. What follows is built on those documents — the July 28 8-K, the same-day Q2 2026 results, the August 14 and August 27 8-Ks, and AMD’s own second-quarter report.
Executive Summary
The announcement matters because of what is contracted versus what is merely available. Approximately 530 MW across five sites is under signed fifteen-year leases, which Core Scientific told investors represents more than $14 billion of potential base contracted revenue. The remaining 1,925 MW is a reservation right — an option AMD may exercise “at certain times and under certain circumstances” before the end of 2028. Both numbers are real; they are not the same kind of real, and the gap between them is the single most important thing to understand about the deal.
The transaction lands on a company in the middle of a fast pivot. Core Scientific’s Q2 2026 colocation revenue was $136.7 million, up from $10.6 million a year earlier, on total revenue of $164.2 million and adjusted EBITDA of $41.1 million. Total leased customer power now stands at roughly 1.1 GW, which the company frames as more than $24 billion of potential contracted revenue. It also reported a net loss of $1,155.3 million, attributed primarily to the change in fair value of warrants as its share price appreciated — an accounting outcome, not a cash one, but one the AMD warrant will keep producing.
For AMD, this is ecosystem construction. Data Center revenue was $6.7 billion in Q2 2026, up 107% year over year and 58% of a company that grew total revenue 50% to $11.5 billion. Securing megawatts where Instinct GPUs and EPYC CPUs can land is a way of removing the physical bottleneck between a chip roadmap and a customer deployment. It also commits a semiconductor company to fifteen-year real-estate obligations, which is not a normal item on a fabless balance sheet.
Five Sites Signed, Four Times That Reserved
The joint press release says AMD “secures more than 500 megawatts of U.S. capacity.” The 8-K filed the same week is more precise: AMD itself is the tenant on 377 MW. The balance that gets the figure over 500 — 152 MW at Auburn and Dalton Phase 3 — is leased by an unnamed Neocloud, industry shorthand for a specialist cloud provider that rents out GPU compute rather than a general-purpose cloud. AMD’s involvement there is indirect: a tri-party Credit Support Agreement among Core Scientific, the Neocloud and AMD that protects AMD equipment on the premises and gives AMD the right, but not the obligation, to cure certain Neocloud defaults.
That structure is sensible and common — a chip vendor backstopping a smaller customer’s lease so the landlord will sign it — but it should be read for what it is. The Credit Support Agreements terminate automatically on the earliest of lease expiration, fifteen years, or “specified circumstances relating to the insolvency or default” of the Neocloud, and AMD may terminate on a material misrepresentation by Core Scientific after a cure period. The filing does not spell out which insolvency circumstances end the support. The protection is therefore strongest in the ordinary case and least defined in the scenario where it would matter most.
The 1,925 MW reservation right deserves equally plain language. It is not a lease, not a commitment to lease, and carries no disclosed reservation fee, exercise price or trigger. What it does is hold Core Scientific’s future development pipeline for AMD’s ecosystem through December 28, 2028. For a landlord in a market where power is the scarce input, exclusivity of that duration has a cost, and the filings do not say what AMD paid for it.
The Warrant Is the Deal’s Second Currency
AMD received a warrant for up to 30 million Core Scientific shares at $23.47 — the five-day volume-weighted average price before execution, so struck at market rather than at a discount. It vests at 12,222 shares per megawatt of critical IT load contemplated by the leases, which is why roughly 6.5 million shares vested immediately against the ~530 MW signed. Run the arithmetic in the other direction and the full 30 million shares correspond to about 2,455 MW: the 530 MW leased plus the 1,925 MW reserved, almost exactly. The warrant is calibrated to the whole 2.5 GW ambition, and it expires July 27, 2031.
This is a well-designed alignment mechanism. AMD only earns equity as it fills halls, and Core Scientific only dilutes as contracted revenue arrives. It is also genuine dilution, and it creates an unusual reporting artifact. Core Scientific carries warrants as liabilities — $1.81 billion in current warrant liabilities at June 30, against $1.77 billion of cash — and marks them to fair value each quarter. When the shares rise, the liability rises and the income statement records a loss. The company’s $1,155.3 million Q2 net loss was, on its own account, primarily that mechanism at work.
The practical consequence for anyone reading future quarters: good news about the stock will keep manufacturing headline losses. Adjusted EBITDA of $41.1 million and gross profit of $70.0 million are the figures that describe the operating business. Neither, however, makes the dilution imaginary. The two facts coexist: the loss is not cash, and the shares are.
The Cash Question: $797.5 Million a Quarter Against a $100 Million Revolver
Core Scientific spent $797.5 million on capital expenditure in Q2 2026, including land and development rights, and closed the acquisition of Polaris DS on August 13 for approximately $444.3 million in cash, with a further $40 million payable if an additional 40 MW of firm electric capacity reaches the target before December 31, 2026. Liquidity at quarter-end was $1,819.4 million. At the second quarter’s spending rate, that is a runway measured in quarters, not years, and the ~530 MW now under lease has to be built before it bills.
Against that, the August 25 credit agreement with JPMorgan Chase as administrative and collateral agent provides a $100.0 million revolving facility and a $500.0 million letter-of-credit facility, secured by a first-priority lien on substantially all assets, maturing in three years or four at the company’s election. The letter-of-credit line is the operationally important half: utilities require credit support for interconnection and project obligations, and $500 million of L/C capacity buys the ability to hold power positions. But only $100 million of it is borrowable cash. This is a liquidity and collateral facility, not a construction financing, and the company has not described how the remaining build is funded.
Two covenant details are worth flagging. Liquidity — unrestricted cash plus undrawn revolver commitments — must be at least $150.0 million at each quarter end. And each revolver borrowing is conditioned on a market capitalisation of at least $3.0 billion at the prior close. That second condition ties access to credit to the equity market’s continuing enthusiasm, at a company whose share price is also the input to its warrant accounting and the strike on AMD’s warrant. It is a reasonable lender protection. It is also a link between financing capacity and sentiment that did not exist before.
Why a Chip Company Signs a Fifteen-Year Lease
AMD’s own quarter explains the motive. Revenue of $11.5 billion was up 50% year over year with 54% GAAP gross margin and $2.3 billion of net income, and Data Center more than doubled to $6.7 billion. Alongside that, AMD reported partnerships to deploy Helios racks with Anthropic at up to 2 gigawatts and with Microsoft on Azure. The constraint on converting that demand into revenue is not wafer supply alone; it is energised, high-density space. Leasing it directly, rather than waiting for customers to find it, shortens the path from an MI400-series launch to an installed rack.
The cost is that a fabless semiconductor company now holds fifteen-year lease obligations with three five-year extensions, in a business whose product cycles run eighteen to twenty-four months. Nvidia’s competitive position, the pace of accelerator obsolescence, and the possibility that end customers prefer someone else’s real estate are all risks that a chip company does not usually take onto its balance sheet. AMD has structured around some of it — the Neocloud takes 152 MW directly, and the 1,925 MW is optional rather than committed — which is exactly the point of the option.
For the wider infrastructure market, the read-through is that GPU vendors are becoming counterparties to data center operators, not just suppliers to them. That is good for operators with power in hand: Core Scientific’s implied economics on the anchor leases, at more than $14 billion over fifteen years across roughly 530 MW, work out to roughly $1.76 million per megawatt-year, against roughly $1.45 million per megawatt-year implied by the $635 million average annualised colocation revenue on 437 MW of billing capacity as of mid-July. It also means the tenant roster in AI colocation increasingly includes firms whose primary business is selling the chips inside — a concentration of interest that buyers negotiating for capacity in the same markets should factor into their own timelines.
Background
Core Scientific designs, builds and operates large-scale, purpose-built data centers for high-density colocation, with facilities in Alabama, Georgia (2), Kentucky, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oklahoma and Texas (4). The majority of its revenue now comes from colocation services for AI workloads; the remainder comes from earning digital assets for its own account and from digital asset mining hosting, and the company says it is repurposing its remaining mining facilities to support colocation as circumstances allow. The scale of that transition shows in one comparison: colocation revenue of $10.6 million in Q2 2025 against $136.7 million in Q2 2026, with billing capacity rising from 225 MW at the end of Q1 2026 to 395 MW at the end of Q2 and 437 MW as of mid-July. On July 29, 2026 the company appointed Mark W. Adams — formerly chief executive of Penguin Solutions and president of Micron Technology — to its board as an independent director.
AMD is the second-largest supplier of data center CPUs and the principal challenger to Nvidia in AI accelerators, selling Instinct GPUs, EPYC server processors and the open-source ROCm software stack. Its recent product cadence includes the Helios rackscale system and the Instinct MI400 series. The competitive problem AMD faces is not only silicon performance but deployment surface: customers need somewhere powered to put the racks. Arrangements in which a chip vendor contracts for megawatts on behalf of its ecosystem — rather than waiting for customers to source capacity themselves — are a recent development in a market where interconnection queues and utility timelines, not manufacturing, increasingly set the pace.
Source: CORZ Stock Rebounds After AMD Partnership Unlocks Multi-Gigawatt AI Expansion — Stocktwits, which surfaced the market reaction to the Core Scientific–AMD partnership and pointed the way to the underlying filings.
Primary sources: Core Scientific and AMD Announce Infrastructure Partnership, joint press release, July 28, 2026 (Exhibit 99.1); Core Scientific Form 8-K filed July 28, 2026 — AMD and Neocloud lease terms, Credit Support Agreements and warrant; Core Scientific Announces Second Quarter 2026 Results, July 28, 2026 (Exhibit 99.1); Core Scientific Form 8-K filed August 14, 2026 — closing of the Polaris DS LLC acquisition; Core Scientific Form 8-K filed August 27, 2026 — JPMorgan Chase credit agreement; AMD Reports Second Quarter 2026 Financial Results, August 4, 2026 (Exhibit 99.1); Core Scientific Form 8-K filed July 29, 2026 — appointment of Mark W. Adams to the board.