Alcoa Nears Sale of Idled Smelter to NYDIG as Bitcoin and AI Chase Industrial Power
Alcoa Corp (NYSE: AA) is nearing a deal to sell a shuttered aluminum smelter in upstate New York to NYDIG in the latest example of legacy industrial sites being repurposed for digital infrastructure.
Alcoa CEO Bill Oplinger told Bloomberg in an interview that the company is in advanced talks with NYDIG over the firm’s Massena East facility, with a transaction potentially closing by mid-year.
The site, located along the St. Lawrence River, has access to hydropower supplied by the New York Power Authority. Alcoa idled the smelter in 2014 after it became uneconomic, but its existing grid interconnection and power capacity have renewed appeal as demand for energy-intensive computing grows.
The potential sale is the latest example of a broader shift in which former heavy industrial sites are being repositioned for Bitcoin mining and high-performance computing (HPC) tied to artificial intelligence workloads. Such facilities often come with large, pre-approved electricity loads that are increasingly difficult to secure for new developments.
Earlier this year, Century Aluminum agreed to sell its Hawesville, Kentucky smelter to TeraWulf, marking another instance of dormant smelting capacity being redirected toward digital infrastructure.
Alcoa has been marketing roughly 10 former smelter sites across the U.S., Bloomberg reported, as operators of data centers and Bitcoin mining facilities seek locations with immediate access to large-scale power amid the buildout of AI and compute capacity.
