Alcoa, the largest U.S. aluminum producer, is reportedly close to turning one of its long-dormant smelters into crypto infrastructure. The company is in advanced talks to sell the Massena East plant in upstate New York to bitcoin firm New York Digital Investment Group (NYDIG), and CEO Bill Oplinger told Bloomberg he expects the transaction to close “in the middle part of this year.”
Sitting on the St. Lawrence River and shuttered in 2014 amid high operating costs and global competition, Massena East’s value today isn’t metal—it’s power. Aluminum smelters are engineered to run 24/7 and come with heavy-duty substations and transmission lines that remain even after production stops. That ready-made grid access can shave years off the time and bureaucracy it normally takes for bitcoin miners and data-center operators to connect to the grid.
Another draw for NYDIG: Massena East has access to hydropower through the New York Power Authority, offering relatively low-cost, carbon-free electricity—an increasingly important selling point for institutional miners trying to improve sustainability credentials.
The proposed sale is part of a broader trend of repurposing energy-heavy industrial sites for digital infrastructure. Earlier this year, Century Aluminum sold a Kentucky smelter to TeraWulf, which plans to redevelop the facility into a digital campus for high-performance computing and AI workloads.
For the crypto sector, these conversions offer a shortcut to large, reliable power supplies; for legacy industrial operators, they provide a way to monetize idle assets. If the Massena East deal closes as expected, it’ll be another clear signal that the hunt for grid-ready, low-carbon energy is reshaping where and how bitcoin mining and data centers expand.
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