NYDIG to buy Alcoa’s Massena smelter for bitcoin mining

NYDIG is in advanced talks to acquire Alcoa’s idled Massena East smelter in Massena, New York. The property spans about 1,300 acres and has an approved capacity of roughly 435 megawatts; the site has been used as a bitcoin-mining campus since 2018.

Alcoa CEO Bill Oplinger confirmed in an April 17 interview that the company is in advanced-stage negotiations and “expects the transaction to close around the middle of the year.” During Alcoa’s first-quarter 2026 earnings call, he described the prospective buyer as a prior partner at the site working on a data center project. Alcoa reported net income of $425 million and adjusted EBITDA of $595 million for the quarter. Financial terms of the potential sale were not disclosed.

The campus draws power from the New York Power Authority through the Moses-Saunders hydroelectric dam on the St. Lawrence River. Alcoa leased the facility to Coinmint in 2018 under a 10-year agreement; NYDIG took a stake in Coinmint in October 2024, which allowed it to deploy its own mining rigs at the site. The operation currently draws about 166 MW of its approved 435 MW and houses roughly 54,000 bitcoin mining units across six former smelting lines.

Alcoa idled Massena East in 2014. The site includes substations, high-voltage lines and other industrial electrical infrastructure built for continuous, heavy loads, features that market the property to data center developers and bitcoin miners that need pre-wired access to the grid. Alcoa has said it plans to divest roughly 10 dormant U.S. smelter properties and to offer them to buyers seeking large, pre-wired industrial footprints with direct utility connections.

NYDIG has been expanding its physical mining capacity in recent years. In March 2025, the firm agreed to acquire Crusoe Energy’s bitcoin mining business, adding more than 270 MW of operating capacity, and it acquired other North American assets in 2024. The Massena East purchase would give NYDIG direct ownership of a site it has operated at for more than a year. Several third-party clients that colocated at Massena, including Cleanspark, Gryphon and Bit Digital, have left the site.

Local officials in the Town of Massena updated zoning and regulations to accommodate cryptocurrency and data-mining operations. The existing mining campus employs about 85 full-time workers across Massena and nearby Plattsburgh. Repurposing the facility relies on existing hydroelectric generation rather than new power plants, a detail that has attracted operators focused on low-carbon power use. The transaction follows previous sales of former smelters to digital infrastructure buyers, including a recent sale of a Kentucky smelter for roughly $200 million in cash and equity.