NYDIG Nears Deal for Alcoa’s Dormant New York Smelter Site

• Alcoa is in advanced talks to sell its dormant Massena East smelter site in New York to NYDIG.
• The deal would deepen NYDIG’s presence at the hydropower-backed campus, where Coinmint already operates under a long-term lease.

Alcoa is close to offloading one of its dormant industrial sites, and the likely buyer is a familiar name in Bitcoin mining. The aluminum producer is in advanced discussions to sell its former Massena East smelter along the St. Lawrence River to New York Digital Investment Group, or NYDIG, according to comments Alcoa chief executive Bill Oplinger made to Bloomberg. Oplinger said the transaction should be completed around the middle of this year. A shuttered smelter becomes the next power-site prize The appeal of the property is not hard to see. Massena East comes with the kind of infrastructure that data center developers and miners increasingly want but rarely build from scratch: a large industrial footprint, existing grid connectivity and access to meaningful power capacity. In this case, the site draws hydropower from the New York Power Authority, which makes it even more attractive in a market where energy cost and reliability remain central to mining economics. The facility was idled in 2014, after high electricity costs and foreign competition continued to erode the economics of domestic aluminum production. Alcoa has been marketing around 10 shuttered U.S. smelter properties, and the interest from digital infrastructure operators suggests these old industrial assets are being recast for an entirely different kind of heavy industry. NYDIG has already been building into Massena For NYDIG, the acquisition would formalize a position it has been building for some time. In October 2024, the Stone Ridge-owned firm took a strategic stake in Coinmint, the colocation provider operating Bitcoin mining equipment at the 435-megawatt Massena campus under a 10-year lease with Alcoa signed in 2018. That investment came before several Coinmint hosting clients, including CleanSpark, Gryphon and Bit Digital, exited the site. The effect was to clear more capacity for NYDIG to deploy additional rigs of its own. So this is not a speculative land grab. It looks more like the next step in a longer consolidation of industrial power, mining infrastructure and site control. For Alcoa, it is an exit from an idle metals asset. For NYDIG, it may be the foundation of a much larger foothold in New York mining.