Alcoa nears deal to sell dormant New York smelter site to Bitcoin miner NYDIG: Bloomberg

Alcoa is close to handing over the keys at Massena East.

The top US aluminum producer is in advanced discussions to sell the former smelter site, which sits along the St. Lawrence River, to New York Digital Investment Group (NYDIG), CEO Bill Oplinger told Bloomberg on Friday. Oplinger said a deal "should be done in the middle part of this year," per the report.

Alcoa has been shopping around 10 shuttered US smelter properties as data center developers and crypto miners scout for large, pre-wired industrial footprints with utility-scale grid access. The Massena East facility draws hydropower from the New York Power Authority and was idled in 2014 after high energy costs and foreign competition dragged on domestic aluminum production.

For NYDIG, buying the site would cement a presence it has been building for more than a year. In October 2024, the Stone Ridge-owned firm took a strategic stake in Coinmint, the colocation host running Bitcoin mining hardware at the 435-megawatt Massena campus under a 10-year lease with Alcoa signed in 2018. That investment preceded a wave of Coinmint hosting client exits, including CleanSpark, Gryphon, and Bit Digital, as NYDIG cleared capacity to run more of its own rigs.

Mintvest Capital, a minority shareholder in Coinmint, alleged in a lawsuit earlier this year that NYDIG had effectively acquired Coinmint for roughly $200 million. (The lawsuit was filed because Mintvest believed it had not been compensated fairly for its share in the company.)

The expected sale extends a growing pattern of retired US smelter sites getting second lives as digital infrastructure. In February, Century Aluminum sold its Hawesville, Kentucky smelter to TeraWulf for $200 million in cash plus a 6.8% minority equity stake in a redevelopment vehicle, with that site earmarked for high-performance computing and AI workloads rather than Bitcoin mining.

NYDIG's continued push into proof-of-work hashrate cuts against the broader industry drift. Public miners including Riot Platforms, Core Scientific, TeraWulf, and IREN have increasingly redirected power capacity toward AI and high-performance computing as post-halving mining economics tighten. BlackRock's recent $40 billion Aligned Data Centers buyout valued power sites at roughly $8 million per megawatt, about 160% above typical public miner valuations.

NYDIG, by contrast, has been one of the most active consolidators in Bitcoin mining since the 2022 bear market. The firm acquired Consensus Technology Group's roughly 120 MW of capacity across North Dakota, South Dakota, Pennsylvania, and Missouri in late 2024, and in March 2025 announced a definitive agreement to buy Crusoe Energy's Bitcoin mining business, including more than 270 MW of generation assets, as Crusoe reoriented toward AI infrastructure.

NYDIG did not respond to Bloomberg's or The Block's requests for comment.