What a datacenter deal headline is worth, and the four numbers that say so

A headline contract value is a total over years, and the years are in the same release.

On 2026-07-14 CleanSpark announced a $6.6 billion lease. That is the number the headlines carried. The same filing says the lease runs 20 years, covers 175 megawatts of critical IT load, and that deliveries are expected to begin in the fourth quarter of 2027. Read together, the four figures say something the first one alone does not: about $330 million a year, for 175 megawatts, starting in about fifteen months.

The value per megawatt per year is the figure that lets one deal be set beside another, because leases differ in size and length and the rate does not care about either. It is a rent: what the tenant pays each year for each megawatt of computing load the landlord keeps powered and cooled. Everything in the rest of this article is one of the four inputs, or that rate.

Twelve leases from nine companies, on the headline scale and on the rate.

Here are the leases on this site's deal tracker that state all three figures, drawn first as the companies announced them. Two things are visible at once: the totals run from about a billion dollars to nineteen, and the size of the number depends as much on the length of the lease as on anything else.

Now the same leases as a rent per megawatt per year, with one taken out. IREN's Microsoft contract is a cloud contract: IREN buys and runs the graphics processors and Microsoft rents the computing, so the $9.7 billion pays for the machines as well as the building and the power. Divided the same way it comes to $9.7 million per megawatt per year, five times any lease below, and that is a fact about what is being sold rather than about the price. The others are colocation leases, where the tenant brings its own machines and pays for the space, the power and the cooling.

The spread is narrower than the headlines: a factor of two across fifteen leases, against a factor of seventeen in the totals. The bars are hatched because the rate is not a figure any company filed; it is three filed figures put together, and a reader who wants the underlying numbers has them in the note under each bar and in the sources list.

For scale, this site's own revenue per energized megawatt for a company that mostly mines bitcoin, quarterly revenue times four over the megawatts it had powered, was about $683,000 a year for CleanSpark and about $422,000 for Hut 8 in their latest quarters. A colocation lease at $1.9 million per megawatt is between about three and four and a half times that, which is the arithmetic behind every miner's datacenter announcement and the reason the deal tracker exists.

A letter of intent, a signed lease and an operating site are three different megawatts.

Every deal on the tracker carries a status, and the status is the first thing to read after the four figures, because the same megawatt count means different things at each stage. A letter of intent is a statement that two parties mean to negotiate; it is usually non-binding and it says so. A contracted lease is signed, with a term and a rent, and the building is often not built. An operating site is billing.

The same reading applies to CleanSpark: 175 megawatts under a signed 20-year lease at Sandersville and 885 megawatts across its Texas sites under a letter of intent with exclusivity. Both appear in the same release; only one has a dollar figure. A press summary that adds them gets 1,060 megawatts; a reader who keeps the statuses apart gets 175 signed and 885 in discussion, which is what the filing says.

Gross and critical IT are a second pair to keep apart. Cipher's Black Pearl lease is 216 megawatts of critical IT inside a 300 megawatt site; Hut 8's Beacon Point phases are 352 megawatts of critical IT supported by 500 megawatts of utility capacity. The rent is paid on the IT figure, and the rate above uses it; the gross figure is the power the site draws, including cooling and losses.

The money to build it is a second headline, in the same filings.

A lease is paid as the site runs, and the site has to be built first. The building costs are large and filed: CleanSpark estimates landlord project costs of $10 to $12 million per megawatt of critical IT, which is $1.75 to $2.1 billion for Sandersville; Core Scientific guides to $11 to $12 million per megawatt for the AMD sites; Riot puts the lab lease's build at about $2.2 billion. The raising-money article explains the tools; here is what one looks like against its lease.

Two things follow. The building is financed against the lease, so the tenant's credit is the landlord's credit: Hut 8's filing names Google as backstopping the lease payments, Cipher's names Google backstopping $1.4 billion of Fluidstack's obligations at Barber Lake, and several leases name no tenant at all. And the notes are issued by a subsidiary formed for the site, which the filings describe; where they are non-recourse, the parent's other assets are not behind them, and the filing says whether they are.

What the headline leaves out.

1. Renewals. Hut 8's $7.0 billion is "up to $17.7 billion if all renewal options are exercised"; Digi Power X's $1.1 billion is "up to $2.5 billion inclusive of renewal terms". The base term is the signed figure; the renewals are options that belong to the tenant.
2. The tenant. A lease to "a high-investment-grade tenant" or "a leading frontier AI lab" is a lease to a company the filing does not name. Some filings name a guarantor instead, which is a different piece of information and worth more than a name.
3. The date. Sandersville begins delivering in the fourth quarter of 2027; Riot's Rockdale lease is build-to-suit. The rent starts when the building is accepted, and the promised-and-delivered article shows how often a construction date moves.
4. Escalators and credits. Core Scientific's CoreWeave contracts carry an annual escalator and a build-out credit of up to $1.5 million per megawatt against hosting payments; TeraWulf received $90 million of prepaid rent from Core42. Each changes when the cash arrives, not the total.
5. Termination. TeraWulf's $9.5 billion Abernathy joint venture with Fluidstack, announced 2025-10-28, was terminated in 2026 and the tracker keeps it with that status. A total that was announced is not a total that was collected.

Read any deal in five steps.

1. Find the four figures in the filing: total value, term, critical-IT megawatts, and status. If one is missing, the rate cannot be built and the deal sits on the tracker with a blank.
2. Divide the total by the term, then by the megawatts. Compare the rate with the bars above, and with what a megawatt earns mining.
3. Read the status word and keep letters of intent apart from signed leases in any sum.
4. Find the build cost per megawatt and the financing line, and set the interest a year against the lease value a year.
5. Check the deal tracker for the row, its filing and its second-source verdict, and the company's profile for what the last quarter's filings say has been delivered.