Written by: Thejaswini M A
Compiled by: Luffy, Foresight News
About an hour’s drive northeast from Austin, Texas, past barbecue joints and barren scrubland, you’ll arrive in Rockdale, Texas. If you roll down your window before the town comes into view, you’ll hear a deep, continuous roar, like a jet engine idling.
Rockdale has built North America’s largest Bitcoin mining cluster on the site of an old aluminum plant, with leading mining companies such as Riot Platforms and Bitdeer establishing operations there. Investigative reports by The New York Times and Al Jazeera have documented the noise: tens of thousands of mining machines, aided by industrial fans, run at full capacity to prevent overheating and shutdowns in Texas’s sweltering heat.
Following the roar, enter the former smelting facility of U.S. Aluminum, where the traces of aluminum production—once a symbol of 20th-century heavy industry—have long vanished. Inside the vast metal warehouse, countless thick copper cables and industrial racks are arranged in every direction, with computer systems fully submerged in churning, circulating synthetic coolant.
Originally used for Bitcoin mining, the equipment is now being gradually replaced with AMD chips to transition into AI model training operations.
Don’t get hung up on whether artificial intelligence is a bubble or whether Bitcoin is in decline—these shifts in industries are merely surface-level. Companies that have secured these facilities understand clearly: the true core asset is the power grid. This is now an industry-wide consensus.
If you still want to know why, the logic stems from the difference in revenue per unit of electricity (calculated based on the LME's real-time price):
- Aluminum smelting: Each kilowatt-hour of electricity generates $0.17–$0.27 in gross revenue.
- Bitcoin mining: Under current market conditions, earnings are only $0.05–$0.11 per kilowatt-hour.
- Run AI inference tasks with H100 GPUs: earn up to $1.27–$3.67 per kilowatt-hour
When electricity costs are low, producing aluminum is a sensible choice; after profit margins in the aluminum industry were squeezed, bitcoin mining took over as a use case for cheap electricity. By 2026, with bitcoin prices depressed, AI operations have clearly become the better option.
The last three transactions clearly demonstrate the industry-wide rush for electricity resources, whether for cryptocurrency mining or AI computing power.
Riot owns a large facility in Rockdale and is not limited to Bitcoin mining—it has leased part of the space to chip giant AMD to build an AI data center. Simply by subleasing power and space, the company can generate hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue.
TeraWulf has launched a major expansion by investing $200 million to acquire the century-old Hallsville aluminum smelter in Kentucky. The primary reason for choosing this location is its existing, well-developed high-power electrical infrastructure. The company plans to dismantle the outdated production equipment and leverage the existing grid to build a large-scale data center campus.
NYDIG identified an abandoned factory in eastern Massena, New York. The site had been idle for years but offered direct access to the St. Lawrence River, providing 435 megawatts of low-cost hydropower. While competitors shifted focus toward AI, NYDIG secured this location solely to lock in affordable electricity and continue its Bitcoin mining operations. Today, the industry no longer builds new facilities from scratch—it competes fiercely for existing power hubs.
For nearly two decades, Bitcoin miners have traveled the globe in search of low-cost electricity: from remote hydroelectric stations in Washington State, to flare gas emission sites in North Dakota oil fields, and to aging industrial power grids in upstate New York. The industry has also developed mature supporting capabilities, including 24/7 high-load power operations, industrial-grade cooling solutions, and long-term contracts for low-cost electricity.
Meanwhile, rising AI companies恰好 need these existing resources and have stronger financial capabilities.
Anthropic is aggressively securing large-scale power resources, while Microsoft, Google, and Amazon are rapidly expanding their data centers—so quickly that power infrastructure development can't keep pace with facility deployments. The three tech giants are now directly competing with Bitcoin miners for the same industrial power supply. Where miners once competed among themselves for electricity, they now face a clear disadvantage against these tech giants.
Data from early 2026 confirmed the industry’s struggles, as Bitcoin’s global hash rate declined for the first time in six years. The current cost to mine one Bitcoin stands at $88,000, while the price remained around $77,000 for much of May this year. Miners operating at standard electricity rates are losing money on every coin mined.
The industry has undergone a collective transformation. Companies such as Hive, Hut 8, TeraWulf, and Iren have gradually dismantled their mining rigs and repurposed them as AI server farms; CoreWeave has completely exited cryptocurrency mining and fully shifted to AI cloud services; MARA acquired a French technology company to complete its business transition. Enterprises that hold access to power resources and position themselves as "power operators" have survived, while miners solely focused on the cryptocurrency sector are now facing crisis.
Energy analysts have dubbed this phenomenon the "digital resource curse": countries and companies are increasingly finding that simply controlling cheap electricity yields greater returns than developing new technologies in-house.
The Gulf states recognized this logic early on. Over the past six decades, they have consistently maintained low electricity prices: in Kuwait, residential electricity rates have remained steady at $0.007 per kWh since 1966; in Abu Dhabi, while the combined production and transmission cost of electricity is approximately $0.087 per kWh, the residential selling price is only $0.014 per kWh. These low electricity prices were originally implemented as a strategy to attract investment, drawing energy-intensive industries such as aluminum smelting, chemicals, and steel production to the desert regions.
Today, the low-cost electricity once allocated to energy-intensive industries has found new users—data centers. Saudi Arabia has established its state-owned AI investment entity, HUMAIN, investing billions of dollars in tech infrastructure; the UAE has begun constructing a 5-gigawatt AI park, attracting companies like OpenAI, Oracle, and NVIDIA to relocate there. The power grid previously used for aluminum smelting now fully supports AI computing demands. The NEOM Oxagon project, originally planned as a floating industrial city, has also been repositioned as a $5 billion AI data center cluster powered by wind and solar energy.
The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace stated: Cloud computing has become the Gulf countries' "new aluminum industry." Instead of exporting physical commodities, they are now leveraging the internet to export computing power derived from fossil fuels and solar energy.
Not only in the Middle East, but Bhutan’s case is also typical.
Bhutan once possessed the world's lowest-cost hydropower resources, and its government-led Bitcoin mining project was once regarded as a benchmark for sovereign mining, reaching a peak holdings of 13,000 Bitcoin. Today, that number has sharply declined to 3,100 Bitcoin, and the mining operations were completely shut down over a year ago. The country's hydropower is now directly fed into India's power grid.
The reasoning behind this mirrors the decision made by U.S. aluminum smelters back then: Is bitcoin mining still the most optimal use of electricity? When the answer is yes, Bhutan continues mining; when selling electricity to India offers more stable revenue without the risk of price volatility, power flows to its neighbor.
Similarly, Starcloud raised $200 million to develop an orbital solar-powered data center. They have just trained the first AI model in space using H100 GPUs and are applying to launch 88,000 satellites. While the project retains Bitcoin mining operations, they serve only as a secondary function: excess power generated by the orbiting solar panels is used for cryptocurrency mining when AI computing resources are idle.
Low Earth orbit offers exceptional conditions for power generation: continuous sunlight, no land use required, and the cold space environment eliminates the need for extensive cooling equipment. Over the past two decades, space launch costs have decreased by 95%.
SpaceX has also deeply entered the battle over power and computing capacity. According to its latest IPO filing, the Colossus 1 data center in Memphis, Tennessee, has been exclusively leased by Anthropic through May 2029, with a total contract value exceeding $40 billion—generating $1.25 billion in monthly revenue for SpaceX from this single asset alone. This data center, like the aluminum plant conversion in Rockdale, was also repurposed from an old electrical equipment factory.
Throughout this industrial transformation, Allbirds’ shift stands as the most surprising case. This sustainable footwear company, once valued at $4 billion at its peak, saw its stock plummet 98% as the consumer brand bubble burst. With its core business struggling to survive, the company leveraged its cash reserves and public listing status to decisively pivot entirely into AI computing infrastructure operations—prompting its stock to surge 350%. The market has voted: operating servers and reselling computational power now generates far higher profits than traditional consumer industries.
Meanwhile, crypto projects such as Bittensor, Render, and Akash have taken a differentiated approach: instead of building large centralized data centers, they aggregate globally distributed idle computing power.
Bittensor creates a computing power marketplace, leveraging a fixed-supply token system to enable various AI models to compete in answering tasks on the platform; the project will halve its daily token issuance in December 2025. Render encourages users to share their idle GPU resources to take on AI tasks; Akash rents out cloud computing power, claiming prices 85% lower than Amazon Web Services.
This distributed computing model is gradually gaining attention. At the 2026 NVIDIA Technology Conference, CEO Jensen Huang compared Bittensor to the classic internet project Folding@home. The latter was originally created to harness the idle computing power of home computers worldwide, turning unused devices into valuable resources; Bittensor, by contrast, incentivizes participation with cryptocurrency tokens to aggregate the idle computing power of gaming consoles and outdated mining rigs.
Looking at the big picture, from the roaring industrial fans of Rockdale to orbiting satellites tracking the sun’s movement, a massive restructuring of physical assets is underway. For companies involved, the only guiding principle is pursuing profit margins. I predict that in ten years, today’s compute facilities may once again be emptied and transformed to support the next generation of emerging industries, while the underground power grid will remain unchanged from the start.
Who controls the cheapest electricity determines the use of computing power. This logic has already been proven in Texas, Bhutan, and Abu Dhabi, and it will hold true just as well in space, 250 miles above the Earth’s surface.