Aluminum Giant Alcoa to Sell Dormant Smelter to Bitcoin Miner NYDIG: Report
US aluminum giant Alcoa is reportedly close to a deal to offload its long-idle Massena East mine in upstate New York to bitcoin mining company New York Digital Investment Group (NYDIG).
The company is in advanced discussions and expects the transaction to close “in the middle of this year,” CEO Bill Oplinger told Bloomberg on Friday. The site, located along the St. Lawrence River, has been inactive since 2014 when Alcoa closed due to energy costs and international competition.
Built for 24/7 heavy industrial operations, aluminum smelters come with pre-existing distribution boards, transmission lines and high capacity grid connections. That makes them an attractive target for Bitcoin miners and data center operators, who often spend years securing the same infrastructure approvals from scratch.
Massena East benefits from hydropower provided by the New York Power Authority, which is key for energy-intensive computing organizations seeking low-cost, low-carbon power plants.
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The potential sale comes amid a broader trend across the US where retired industrial sites are being repurposed for digital infrastructure. Earlier this year, Century Aluminum sold its Hawesville smelter in Kentucky to Terra Wolf for $200 million.
Meanwhile, NYDIG has been growing its footprint in the Bitcoin (BTC) mining infrastructure. The firm, owned by Stone Ridge, already owns a stake in Coinmint, which operates mining hardware on the same campus under a long-term lease.
Last year, Crusoe Energy agreed to sell its Bitcoin mining operations, including its digital flare mitigation business, to NYDIG.
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Bitcoin miners to AI
NYDIG's renewed focus on Bitcoin mining comes as other miners are pushing to diversify their revenue streams by turning to AI and cloud computing in mining.
At the beginning of this year, MARA Holdings acquired a 64% stake in the French infrastructure company Exaion, which allowed the company to stay in AI services. Other miners, including Hive, Hut 8, TeraWulf, and Iren, are also upgrading their mining facilities to data centers, and some, such as CoreWeave, have converted to AI-based infrastructure.
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