If you drive about an hour northeast of Austin, past the barbecue joints and dry brush, you’ll hit Rockdale, Texas. If you roll down your window before you even see the town, you’ll hear it: a massive, continuous, mechanical roar that sounds like a jet engine idling in the dirt.
You don’t need to set foot in Texas to hear it. Rockdale is home to North America’s largest Bitcoin mining operations (like Riot Platforms and Bitdeer) housed in an old aluminium plant. Investigative journalists from the New York Times and Al Jazeera have documented that ‘jet engine’ roar, it’s the sound of thousands of industrial fans keeping tens of thousands of ASIC mining computers from melting down in the Texas heat.
Follow that noise, and you’ll find the old Alcoa aluminium smelter. For decades, it was a brutal, sweating monument to 20th-century manufacturing.
Today, if you look inside those same metal warehouses, there isn’t an ounce of aluminium in sight. Instead, you’ll find miles of thick copper cables and industrial racks where computers are completely submerged in tanks of churning, boiling synthetic oil just to stay cool.
First, it was Bitcoin. Now the gear is being swapped out for AMD chips to train AI.
Don’t look at this shuffle and try to guess whether AI is a bubble or Bitcoin is dead (it’s not); you’re missing the forest for the trees. The companies buying up these leases don’t care about that. They know that the asset is the power line. If they didn’t know it then, they definitely know it now.
If you are still wondering why, one kilowatt-hour of electricity generates roughly $0.17 to $0.27 in gross revenue when used to smelt aluminium, depending on the LME price.
Bitcoin mining with current-generation ASICs produces $0.05 to $0.11 per kilowatt-hour at today’s prices.
AI inference running on H100 GPUs, billed through cloud pricing, generates $1.27 to $3.67 per kilowatt-hour.
Aluminium was a reasonable use of cheap electricity when nothing better was available. Bitcoin requires a reasonable use of cheap electricity when aluminium margins are compressed.
The bitcoin price justified this for some time. Now in 2026, AI is a better use of cheap electricity than bitcoin at almost any price the crypto market has hit this year.
If you want to understand how fast the ground is shifting, you only need to look at three recent deals. They show exactly how companies are scrambling to grab any power source they can find, whether they use it for AI or crypto.
Riot had a giant site in Rockdale, Texas, but instead of just using it to mine bitcoin, they leased a chunk of the space to the chip giant AMD for an AI data centre project. Riot realised they could make hundreds of millions of dollars simply by letting others use their power hookups.
TeraWulf did a similar thing on a massive scale. They paid $200 million to buy the old Century Aluminium plant in Hawesville, Kentucky. They bought it because an aluminium smelter already has giant, heavy-duty electrical infrastructure built into the land. TeraWulf is going to tear down the old factory parts and build a data centre campus right on top of those power lines.
NYDIG went after the old Massena East factory in New York. This site used to be owned by the aluminium giant Alcoa and has been sitting mostly empty for years. But it has direct access to 435 megawatts of cheap, clean hydropower from the St. Lawrence River. While other companies are switching to AI, NYDIG bought this specific spot to lock in cheap hydropower for its bitcoin mining. Is nobody building from scratch anymore?
For almost 20 years, Bitcoin miners wandered the map in search of the cheapest energy. They set up next to remote hydro plants in rural Washington state, tapped into flared gas vents in North Dakota oil fields, and took over old industrial grids in upstate New York. They built facilities capable of using large amounts of electricity around the clock without damaging the hardware. They mastered industrial cooling, low-cost power contracts, and 24-hour operations.
Then AI companies showed up needing precisely what these companies already had, and the AI companies had a much bigger budget, too.
Anthropic is locking down massive amounts of electricity. At the same time, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon are building data centres so fast that the electric companies can’t even get the power lines hooked up in time. All three are bidding directly against bitcoin miners for the same industrial power lines. Bitcoin miners used to fight each other for electricity, but now the richest corporations are fighting for the same input, and we know who’s losing here.
You can see the damage in the numbers from early 2026. For the first time in six years, the total amount of computing power on the Bitcoin network declined. The production cost of mining one bitcoin is 88000 dollars, but the token traded around 77000 dollars for much of May 2026. If you are a miner paying normal power rates, you are losing money on every single coin you make.
So, everyone is swapping jerseys. Companies like Hive, Hut 8, TeraWulf, and Iren are ripping out their mining rigs to make room for AI servers. CoreWeave quit bitcoin completely to build an AI cloud network, and MARA bought a French tech company just to pivot. The miners who treated themselves like power brokers are surviving. The ones who thought they were crypto guys are running out of money.
Energy analysts call this the “digital resource curse.” This means countries and companies are realising that simply owning and holding onto raw electricity makes more money than actually building new technology.
The Gulf states figured this out long before the crypto industry did.
For around sixty years, Gulf governments sold electricity at very low prices. In Kuwait, the home electricity rate has been fixed at 0.7 cents per kilowatt-hour since 1966. Abu Dhabi spends about 8.7 cents to make and deliver a kilowatt-hour of electricity, then it sells it to citizens for 1.4 cents. These low rates were the government's strategy to build up industry, to tempt heavy industries into the desert. Aluminium smelters, chemical plants, and steel mills were built there only because power was almost free.
Source: bakerinstitute.org
Now, instead of aluminium smelters, that cheap electricity is bringing in data centres. Saudi Arabia started a state-backed AI investment firm called HUMAIN to invest billions in tech infrastructure. The UAE broke ground on its massive 5-gigawatt Stargate AI campus, bringing in OpenAI, Oracle, and Nvidia to use the very power grids that once melted aluminium ore. Even NEOM’s Oxagon, which started as a plan for a floating factory city, is now a 5-billion-dollar AI data centre campus powered by wind and solar.
As the Carnegie Endowment noted, cloud computing is becoming the Gulf’s new aluminium. They are just exporting their fossil fuels and solar power through the internet instead of shipping physical cargo.
Then there is Bhutan.
Bhutan had the cheapest hydroelectric power in the world – my favourite Bitcoin mining story –and a government-backed bitcoin mining operation that was supposed to be the sovereign mining success narrative. Holdings peaked at around 13,000 bitcoin and dropped to 3,100. Mining inflows stopped more than a year ago. The energy appears to be now being sold directly to India.
This is the same calculation Alcoa made. Is Bitcoin the most profitable thing we can do with this electricity? When the answer was yes, Bhutan mined. When selling electrons to the Indian grid became more reliable than converting them to bitcoin at uncertain prices, the power went to India.
Similarly, Starcloud raised $200 million to build solar-powered data centres in orbit. They just trained the first AI model in space using an H100 GPU and are filing for 88000 satellites. Their plan includes mining Bitcoin, but only as a side hustle. When their orbital solar panels are soaking up the sun, and the AI queues are quiet, mining crypto is the most profitable way to use the leftover capacity.
In low Earth orbit, solar panels get continuous, raw sunlight. There is no night cycle or land costs. You do not even need cooling infrastructure beyond the freezing temperature of space itself. Plus, the cost of launching hardware up there has dropped by 95% over the last twenty years.
SpaceX is playing this exact same power game. According to its recent IPO paperwork, the company is earning $1.25 billion per month from Anthropic, which just signed a deal to rent all the computing power at SpaceX’s Colossus 1 data centre in Memphis, Tennessee. That contract is worth over $40 billion through May 2029. Just like the crypto miners who took over the old aluminium smelter in Rockdale, SpaceX set up Colossus 1 inside a converted Electrolux appliance factory.
Now, Allbirds is the most absurd example in this whole piece. It was a sustainable shoe company. At peak, Allbirds was valued at $4 billion. Then the direct-to-consumer brand bubble deflated, and the stock fell 98%. They had some cash, a public company listing, and nothing working in footwear. They pivoted entirely to AI compute infrastructure. The stock rose 350%. Same logic here. Whatever Allbirds makes or does, the market has decided that being in the business of running electricity through servers pays more than being in any other consumer business.
Crypto networks like Bittensor, Render, and Akash are focusing on a different approach. Instead of creating a single large facility, they want to connect smaller computers distributed around the globe.
Bittensor operates a marketplace where AI models compete to answer questions, using a fixed token supply modelled after Bitcoin.
It even cut its daily token creation in half back in December 2025. Meanwhile, Render lets people share their extra graphics card power for AI jobs, and Akash rents out cloud computing space at prices they claim are 85 per cent cheaper than Amazon Web Services.
The strategy is getting mainstream attention. At Nvidia’s tech conference in 2026, CEO Jensen Huang compared Bittensor to Folding@home, an old internet project.
That makes sense because Folding@home happened because millions of home computers were just sitting there, literally burning electricity to do nothing. They figured out how to bundle that digital dust into something useful. Bittensor is asking people to donate their spare gaming PCs and leftover mining rigs and dangling crypto tokens to get them to plug in.
When I look at this entire landscape, from the roaring fans in Rockdale to satellites orbiting the earth just to chase raw sunlight. I see a massive, frantic reshuffling of physical assets. The people running these companies are only loyal to the margins. My bet is that in ten years, we’ll see these exact same warehouses get gutted all over again for whatever comes after AI, while the physical grid underneath them remains completely unchanged.
Whoever finds the cheapest electricity gets to decide what computation runs on it. That has been true in Texas, Bhutan, and Abu Dhabi, and it will be true 250 miles above all of them.
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