Alcoa Nears Sale of Massena Smelter to NYDIG

Alcoa is in advanced talks to sell its Massena East smelter campus on the St. Lawrence River in New York to Bitcoin miner NYDIG, the company confirmed. The idled facility has been offline since 2014 and draws hydropower from the New York Power Authority.

According to Alcoa CEO Bill Oplinger, a deal ‘should be done in the middle part of this year.'

Massena East is one of roughly 10 shuttered U.S. smelter properties Alcoa has marketed to potential buyers. Data center operators and cryptocurrency miners have sought large, pre-wired industrial sites with direct grid access.

Alcoa closed Massena operations after high energy costs and foreign competition reduced domestic aluminum production. The site has not produced aluminum since 2014.

NYDIG already operates at the Massena campus through Coinmint, the colocation host that runs mining hardware at the 435-megawatt site under a 10-year lease signed in 2018. In October 2024 NYDIG took a strategic stake in Coinmint; several hosting clients then exited as capacity was cleared for NYDIG to operate more machines. A minority Coinmint shareholder filed a lawsuit alleging NYDIG effectively acquired the company for roughly $200 million and that the shareholder was not paid fairly.

Since the 2022 downturn, NYDIG has been an active consolidator in proof-of-work mining. The firm acquired about 120 megawatts of capacity from Consensus Technology Group across four states in late 2024, and in March 2025 agreed to buy Crusoe Energy's Bitcoin mining business, which includes more than 270 megawatts of generation assets while Crusoe shifts focus to artificial intelligence infrastructure.

Retired smelter sites have been repurposed for 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; that site is planned for high-performance computing and AI workloads rather than Bitcoin mining.

A recent large data center buyout valued power-rich locations at roughly $8 million per megawatt, about 160% higher than valuations typically seen in public miner transactions.

If the Massena sale closes this year, NYDIG would gain ownership of a large, grid-connected site that could be used to expand its mining operations.