Alcoa Close to Offloading Dusty Smelter to Bitcoin Miner NYDIG CATEGORY: Industry News

Aluminum goliath Alcoa is on the verge of unloading its long-dormant Massena East smelter in upstate New York to Bitcoin mining outfit New York Digital Investment Group (NYDIG), according to sources familiar with the deal. CEO Bill Oplinger told Bloomberg that talks are in the advanced stages and the transaction should wrap up "somewhere in the middle of this year." The facility, perched along the St. Lawrence River, has been collecting dust since 2014 when Alcoa pulled the plug amid soaring energy bills and brutal global competition.

Built to run 24/7 for heavy industrial grunt work, aluminum smelters come bundled with ready-made substations, transmission lines and high-capacity grid hookups—making them irresistible to Bitcoin miners and data center operators who otherwise spend years grinding through the same bureaucratic maze just to get a transformer approved. Massena East also gets sweet hydropower from the New York Power Authority, a major lure for power-hungry computing outfits chasing cheap, cleaner electrons.

The potential deal lands amid a wider wave rolling across the US, where retired industrial relics are getting a second life as digital infrastructure. Earlier this year, Century Aluminum peddled its Hawesville smelter in Kentucky to TeraWulf for a cool $200 million, with plans to retrofit it into a high-performance computing and AI playground. TeraWulf shares have ridden that momentum to an 80% gain year-to-date.

NYDIG, backed by Stone Ridge, has been quietly stacking up Bitcoin mining infrastructure. The firm already holds a stake in Coinmint, which runs mining hardware at the same campus under a long-term lease arrangement. Last year, Crusoe Energy also inked a deal to flip its Bitcoin mining arm—including its digital flare mitigation gig—to NYDIG.

NYDIG's renewed enthusiasm for Bitcoin mining arrives as other miners chase AI and cloud computing to pad revenues as mining margins grow thinner. Earlier this year, MARA Holdings grabbed a 64% stake in French infrastructure company Exaion, snagging a launchpad into AI services. Other miners including Hive, Hut 8, TeraWulf and Iren are likewise converting mining sites into data centers, while some—like CoreWeave—have gone all-in on AI-focused infrastructure.