If you drive northeast from Austin for about an hour, past barbecue joints and dry bushes, you'll reach Rockdale, Texas. If you roll down your window before you even see the town, you'll hear a huge, continuous mechanical roar, sounding like a jet engine idling in the dirt. You don't have to set foot in Texas to hear this sound. Rockdale is home to some of North America's largest Bitcoin mining companies, such as Riot Platforms and Bitdeer, all housed in an abandoned aluminum smelter. Investigative journalists from The New York Times and Al Jazeera have documented this "jet engine" roar—the sound of thousands of industrial fans operating to prevent tens of thousands of ASIC mining computers from overheating and melting in the Texas heat. Following the sound, you'll find the former Alcoa aluminum smelter, a brutal and suffocating testament to 20th-century manufacturing for decades. Today, if you walk into those former metal warehouses, you won't find a trace of aluminum. Instead, miles of thick copper cables and industrial racks stretch out, with computers completely submerged in boiling, bubbling synthetic oil tanks to maintain the low temperatures. First Bitcoin, now AMD chips have replaced the previous hardware for training artificial intelligence. Don't jump to conclusions based on this mess, thinking AI is a bubble or Bitcoin is dead (neither); you're missing the forest for the trees. The companies acquiring these leases don't care about this. They know the real asset is the power transmission lines. Even if they didn't know before, they certainly do now. If you're still wondering why, one kilowatt-hour of electricity used for aluminum smelting generates approximately $0.17 to $0.27 in gross revenue, based on London Metal Exchange (LME) prices. At current prices, Bitcoin mining using current-generation ASIC miners yields between $0.05 and $0.11 per kilowatt-hour. AI inference running on H100 GPUs, billed via cloud pricing, generates between $1.27 and $3.67 per kilowatt-hour. In the absence of better alternatives, aluminum production is a way to make efficient use of cheap electricity. Similarly, Bitcoin production requires making efficient use of cheap electricity, especially given the shrinking profit margins in aluminum. The price of Bitcoin has indeed validated this for some time. But by 2026, regardless of almost any price level the cryptocurrency market has reached this year, artificial intelligence will be a more efficient way to utilize cheap electricity than Bitcoin. If you want to understand how fast the industry landscape is changing, just look at three recent deals. They clearly demonstrate that companies are scrambling to grab any available energy, whether for AI or cryptocurrency. Riot Games owns a large mining farm in Rockdale, Texas, but instead of just using it to mine Bitcoin, they leased part of it to chip giant AMD for an AI data center project. Riot Games realized they could make hundreds of millions of dollars simply by providing power connections to others. TeraWulf did something similar, only on a larger scale. They spent $200 million to acquire the Old Century Aluminum plant in Hawsville, Kentucky. They acquired it because the aluminum smelter already had a massive heavy-duty power infrastructure. TeraWulf plans to demolish the old factory and build a data center campus above the power transmission lines. NYDIG has its eye on an old factory in eastern Massena, New York. The land, formerly owned by aluminum giant Alcoa, has been largely idle for years. However, it can directly utilize 435 megawatts of cheap, clean hydroelectric power from the St. Lawrence River. While other companies are turning to artificial intelligence, NYDIG bought the land specifically to lock in cheap hydroelectric resources for Bitcoin mining. Is no one willing to build from scratch now? For nearly 20 years, Bitcoin miners have been scrambling to find the cheapest energy. They've set up camp near hydroelectric power stations in remote parts of Washington state, generated electricity from natural gas vents in North Dakota oil fields, and taken over abandoned industrial power grids in upstate New York. The facilities they build can use massive amounts of electricity around the clock without damaging the hardware. They mastered the skills of industrial cooling, low-cost electricity contracts, and 24/7 operation. Then AI companies emerged, needing exactly what these companies already possessed, and with even larger budgets. Anthropic is consuming massive amounts of electricity. Meanwhile, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon are building data centers at an astonishing pace, so much so that power companies simply can't keep up with connecting power lines. These three companies are all vying with Bitcoin miners for the same batch of industrial power lines. In the past, Bitcoin miners competed with each other for electricity, but now, the wealthiest companies are fighting for the same power resources, and we all know who the ultimate loser will be. The losses can be seen from data in early 2026. The total hashrate of the Bitcoin network declined for the first time in six years. The production cost of mining one Bitcoin is $88,000, but for most of May 2026, Bitcoin traded at around $77,000. If you were a miner paying normal electricity bills, you were losing money on every Bitcoin you mined. Therefore, everyone is changing jobs. Companies like Hive, Hut 8, TeraWulf, and Iren are dismantling their mining rigs to make room for AI servers. CoreWeave has completely abandoned Bitcoin in favor of building an AI cloud network, and MARA acquired a French tech company as part of its transformation. Those miners who once considered themselves industry giants have survived. Those who thought themselves cryptocurrency experts are now facing financial difficulties. Energy analysts call this the "digital resource curse." This means that countries and businesses are increasingly realizing that simply owning and holding electricity resources is more profitable than actually developing new technologies. Gulf states recognized this long before the cryptocurrency industry. For approximately six decades, Gulf governments have sold electricity at extremely low prices. In Kuwait, the price of residential electricity has been fixed at 0.7 cents per kilowatt-hour since 1966. In Abu Dhabi, the cost of producing and transmitting electricity is approximately 8.7 cents per kilowatt-hour, which is then sold to residents for 1.4 cents per kilowatt-hour. These low electricity prices are a strategy employed by governments to develop industry and attract heavy industry to desert regions. Aluminum smelters, chemical plants, and steel mills were built there because electricity was virtually free. Now, cheap electricity is no longer used for aluminum smelting, but for building data centers. Saudi Arabia has established a state-owned artificial intelligence investment company called HUMAIN, planning to invest billions of dollars in technology infrastructure. The UAE has broken ground on its massive 5-gigawatt Stargate AI park, attracting companies like OpenAI, Oracle, and Nvidia, utilizing the power grid once used for aluminum smelting. Even NEOM's Oxagon, initially planned as a floating factory city, has now developed into a $5 billion AI data center park powered by wind and solar energy. As the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace points out, cloud computing is becoming the new aluminum industry in the Gulf region. They're simply exporting fossil fuels and solar energy via the internet, not transporting physical goods. Then there's Bhutan. Bhutan once had the world's cheapest hydropower—my favorite Bitcoin mining story—and a government-backed Bitcoin mining project that was initially touted as a model of successful sovereign mining. Bhutan held approximately 13,000 Bitcoins at one point, before dropping to 3,100. Funding for mining stopped over a year ago. Now it appears that the electricity was sold directly to India. This aligns with Alcoa's calculations. Is Bitcoin the greatest benefit we could gain from using this electricity? When the answer was yes, Bhutan started mining. Electricity flows to India when selling it to the Indian grid is more reliable than converting it into Bitcoin at an uncertain price. Similarly, Starcloud has raised $200 million to build solar-powered data centers in orbit. They've just trained their first AI model in space using H100 GPUs and are applying to launch 88,000 satellites. Their plans include Bitcoin mining, but only as a sideline. Mining cryptocurrency is the most profitable way to utilize surplus computing power when the solar panels in orbit absorb solar energy and the AI mission queue is idle. In low Earth orbit, solar panels can continuously receive raw sunlight. There is no night, and no land costs. Besides the extremely low temperatures of space itself, no cooling infrastructure is needed. Furthermore, the cost of launching hardware into space has decreased by 95% over the past two decades. SpaceX is playing the same power game. According to its recent IPO filing, the company receives $1.25 billion per month in revenue from Anthropic. Anthropic has just signed an agreement to lease all the computing power of SpaceX's Colossus 1 data center in Memphis, Tennessee. This contract, worth over $40 billion, runs until May 2029. Just as cryptocurrency miners took over an old aluminum smelter in Rockdale, SpaceX is building Colossus 1 within a converted Electrolux appliance factory. Now, Allbirds is the most absurd example in this article. It was once a sustainable footwear company. At its peak, Allbirds was valued at $4 billion. Then, the direct-to-consumer brand bubble burst, and its stock price plummeted 98%. At that time, they had some cash on hand, were publicly listed, but had nothing to show for their footwear business. So, they completely transformed themselves, venturing into the field of artificial intelligence computing infrastructure. As a result, their stock price soared 350%. The same logic applies to Allbirds. Regardless of what Allbirds produces, the market seems to have determined that running a server power delivery business is more profitable than running any other consumer goods business. Crypto networks like Bittensor, Render, and Akash are taking a different approach. Instead of creating a large, single facility, they aim to connect small computers distributed globally. Bittensor operates an AI model marketplace that uses a fixed supply of tokens modeled after Bitcoin to allow AI models to compete against each other to answer questions. It halved its daily token issuance as early as December 2025. Meanwhile, Render allows users to share excess GPU computing power for AI tasks, while Akash rents out cloud computing space at a price reportedly 85% cheaper than Amazon Web Services. This strategy is gaining mainstream media attention. At Nvidia's 2026 technology conference, CEO Jensen Huang compared Bittensor to Folding@home (an early internet project). This makes sense, as Folding@home arose from millions of home computers sitting idle, wasting electricity. They found a way to transform this "digital garbage" into a useful resource. Bittensor is appealing to people to donate idle gaming PCs, surplus mining equipment, and idle crypto tokens to encourage participation in the Folding@home project. When I look around at this scene, from the roaring fans in Rockdale to the satellites orbiting the Earth chasing the sun, I see a massive, frantic restructuring of physical assets. The managers of these companies are only loyal to immediate profits. I bet in ten years, these warehouses will be completely emptied for post-AI purposes, while the physical networks beneath remain unchanged. Whoever can find the cheapest electricity can decide what computing programs to run on it. This was true in Texas, Bhutan, and Abu Dhabi, and it remains true 250 miles above those three locations.
Brian
Kikyo
Hui Xin
Catherine
Clement
Alex
YouQuan