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- Alcoa is in advanced talks to sell its Massena East smelter in New York to NYDIG.
- The agreement will expand NYDIG’s presence at the hydropower-backed campus, where Coinmint already operates on a long-term lease.
Alcoa is about to unload one of its inactive sites, and the potential buyer is a household name Bitcoin mining.
The aluminum producer is in advanced talks to sell its former Massena East smelter on the St. Louis River. Lawrence to the New York Digital Investment Group, or NYDIG, according to Alcoa CEO Bill Oplinger Bloomberg. Oplinger said the project should be completed by the middle of this year.
A closed reactor is the next prize for the power station
The attraction of the place is not hard to see. Massena East comes with the kind of infrastructure that data developers and miners increasingly want but don’t tend to build from scratch: large industrial sites, existing grid connections and access to energy.
In this case, the site draws hydropower from the New York Power Authority, making it attractive to the market where energy cost and reliability remain at the heart of the mining economy. The facility was commissioned in 2014, after high energy costs and foreign competition continued to erode the economy of domestic aluminum production.
Alcoa has been selling about 10 smelters in the US, and the interest from digital workers shows that these old industrial properties are being repurposed for the rich industry.
NYDIG has already been building in Massena
About IMPORTANTThe takeover would establish a position that has been in the making for a long time. In October 2024, the company that owns Stone Ridge took part in Coinmint, a provider of Bitcoin mining equipment at the 435-megawatt Massena campus under a 10-year lease with Alcoa signed in 2018.
The funding came before several Coinmint clients, including CleanSpark, Gryphon and Bit Digital, pulled out of the site. The result was to free up more power for NYDIG to use its other resources.
So this is not just an imaginary land grab. It is seen as the next step in the integration of industrial power, mining infrastructure and land management. For Alcoa, it’s getting out of the business. For NYDIG, it could be the basis for a larger area of mining in New York.
