Alcoa near sale of Massena East smelter to NYDIG

Alcoa is in advanced talks to sell its long-idle Massena East aluminum smelter in upstate New York to Bitcoin miner New York Digital Investment Group (NYDIG). The company expects the transaction 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 inactive since 2014. Alcoa closed the plant after rising energy costs and global competition made production uneconomical.

The smelter was built for continuous, heavy industrial operation and includes on-site substations, transmission lines and high-capacity grid connections. Those existing electrical and transmission assets can shorten the time and approvals needed to start large computing operations.

Massena East receives hydropower from the New York Power Authority, supplying relatively low-cost and lower-carbon electricity that is suitable for energy-intensive computing like Bitcoin mining and high-performance computing.

NYDIG, owned by Stone Ridge, already has ties to the campus. The firm holds a stake in Coinmint, which operates mining hardware on the site under a long-term lease. Last year NYDIG acquired a Bitcoin mining business that included digital flare mitigation operations.

Retired smelters and industrial campuses in the United States have been repurposed to host data centers and computing facilities. Earlier this year, Century Aluminum sold the Hawesville smelter in Kentucky for $200 million with plans to convert the site for high-performance computing and artificial intelligence workloads.

If the sale of Massena East completes, the campus would transition from aluminum production to supporting energy-intensive computing operations, using existing power and transmission infrastructure to serve new occupants.