Alcoa, the largest aluminum producer in the U.S., is preparing to repurpose industrial power capacity for the crypto era. Bloomberg reports the company is in advanced talks to sell its idle Massena East smelter in upstate New York to bitcoin firm New York Digital Investment Group (NYDIG), with a deal expected to close “in the middle part of this year,” according to CEO Bill Oplinger.
The Massena East site—on the St. Lawrence River—has been dormant since Alcoa shut it in 2014 amid high operating costs and global competition. What makes the location valuable today isn’t the aluminum equipment but the electricity infrastructure that remains: dedicated substations, heavy transmission lines and direct access to hydropower from the New York Power Authority.
That kind of grid-ready setup is exactly what bitcoin miners and data-center developers crave. Aluminum smelters are engineered to run 24/7 and draw massive, stable power. Repurposing a smelter can shave years off the permitting, interconnection and build timelines that typically slow down big crypto and compute projects, while providing access to low-cost, carbon-free energy—an increasingly important selling point.
Alcoa’s move is part of a broader trend of converting idle heavy-industry sites into digital infrastructure hubs. Earlier this year, Century Aluminum sold a Kentucky smelter to TeraWulf (WULF), which plans to build a digital campus for high-performance computing and AI workloads.
For crypto firms, these transactions are a practical shortcut to large, reliable power without the lengthy grid hookup process. For industrial landlords like Alcoa, they offer a way to monetize dormant assets and tap booming demand for energy-ready real estate in an era of expanding crypto mining and data-center buildouts.
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