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The article was supplemented and updated: July 2, 20:03 UTC
The Nasdaq-listed treasury company is investing in a 150 MW powered-land deal, has stopped adding to its coin stack, and is retiring the dashboard built around it.
Empery Digital is making its clearest move yet away from simply holding Bitcoin. The Nasdaq-listed company (NASDAQ: EMPD) has signed a definitive agreement to put $65 million into a 25% stake in a private entity that is buying a Midwest industrial site and converting it into an AI data center — and it is being blunt about what that means for the rest of the balance sheet.
The investment signals a shift and indicates where the company plans to allocate capital going forward.
Empery Digital told BitBullNews.
The line that will catch the eye of anyone tracking the Bitcoin-treasury trade is the next one: the company said it believes the data center investment is worth more than its Bitcoin holdings, based on the net present value of the future cash flows from the $1 billion in potential lease payments over 15 years. It still holds Bitcoin, but says capital from here will go where it delivers the most value for shareholders.
The asset
The facility has run as a power-intensive industrial site for the past three years and comes with an owned substation and roughly 150 MW of available capacity under an existing agreement with the local utility. A recent load study confirmed the site can almost double that to about 300 MW of power ready for AI workloads — the kind of pre-built, grid-connected capacity that has become the scarcest input in the data center build-out.
A lease that could reach $1 billion
The economics hang on a triple-net lease. An affiliate of Hunt Properties, the managing member of the acquiring entity, has signed a non-binding letter of intent to finalise a lease that could produce up to $1 billion in payments, with a leading compute provider that in turn serves a global leader in AI computing hardware.
Empery Digital put detail on that headline number. The $1 billion is triple-net over 15 years, the company said, and is expected to roughly double once the power upgrade to about 300 MW is complete. Under a triple-net structure, the tenant carries the full cost of building and operating the data center while the property owner simply collects rent.
The property owner will not be involved in the data center build out or operations and instead will simply collect lease payments from the tenant.
the company said.
As for who is ultimately on the hook for that rent, Empery described the end tenant as “a very large investment grade globally recognized leader in AI computing hardware” — a credit profile that, if the lease lands as drafted, would give the property long-duration, high-quality cash flow. The LOI is being converted into a definitive triple-net lease, with the investment and lease expected to close in the third quarter of 2026, subject to customary conditions.
Stepping back from the coin stack
For a company built on a Bitcoin treasury strategy, the bigger signal is what it is no longer doing. Effective immediately, Empery Digital is discontinuing its treasury dashboard, saying a NAV figure based on Bitcoin holdings no longer fully reflects the company’s total NAV. It also said it has no current plans to accumulate more Bitcoin, and will report value to shareholders through updates filed in line with securities laws as future powered-land opportunities materialise.
That is a meaningful turn for a firm whose pitch had been aggregating Bitcoin and maximising Bitcoin per share. The position is no longer off-limits: the company now says it may sell Bitcoin to fund this deal and similar ones ahead, reframing the story around lease cash flows rather than coins on the balance sheet.
How it pays — and the value gap it’s chasing
A day after the deal was announced, Empery closed the funding question the original disclosure had left open. Its only obligation is the $65 million needed to settle the 25% stake; under the LOI, the tenant funds all data center build-out costs, power usage and operating costs.
The company said it already has that $65 million on its balance sheet and does not intend to issue equity at or near current share price levels — a direct answer to the dilution worry, and a pointed stance in a sector that leans heavily on selling stock. Where the cash comes from instead sharpens the pivot: Empery said it may sell Bitcoin to fund this investment and similar deals ahead. It still holds coins and has no plans to add more.
The logic behind that is a valuation argument. Empery said it believes its current net asset value meaningfully exceeds its market valuation, and that the added value from a hyperscaler-anchored property widens that gap rather than closing it. In short, management thinks the market is underpricing the company, and that trading some Bitcoin exposure for long-dated lease income makes that case stronger.
This investment is a noteworthy opportunity that we believe creates real, lasting value for shareholders because it doesn’t require us to go back to the market for additional capital.
said Ryan Lane, Co-CEO of Empery Digital, pointing to the tenant carrying the full cost of the build-out, power and operations. He added that Empery plans to keep allocating capital to similar hyperscaler-anchored deals.
Capital, not operations
Empery is the money in this partnership, not the operator, and it leans on Hunt Properties for everything on the ground. The edge, as the company frames it, is the combination: Hunt’s decades of work on utility interconnection, power procurement and energy-infrastructure development, plus its network of relationships across the U.S., paired with Empery’s public-company platform, capital-markets expertise and balance sheet.
This investment is a very unique opportunity to capitalize on the exploding demand for compute and power and partner with some of the best energy operators and investors in North America.
said Ryan Lane, Co-CEO of Empery Digital.
Al Allred, Chairman of Hunt Properties, said meeting AI and HPC demand “requires operational capability and sophisticated access to capital,” and called Empery’s capital-markets depth the reason it made the right partner.
The two have already lined up further targets and say they will update the market as additional pipeline assets come together. Plenty of Bitcoin miners and treasury companies are pivoting toward AI and high-performance computing; Empery’s version is to show up as the capital partner on powered land rather than as the company racking and running the servers.