A History of Technological Evolution Powered by Electricity: Aluminum, Bitcoin, and AI
The journey from the Rockdale aluminum smelter in Texas to space-based data centers illustrates a core economic principle: whoever controls the cheapest electricity dictates the use of computing power.
The evolution is clear. Old industrial sites with pre-existing, high-capacity power grids are being repurposed. In Rockdale, a former Alcoa plant now houses vast Bitcoin mining rigs, which are increasingly being replaced by AMD chips for AI training. The logic is purely financial: while smelting aluminum yields $0.17–0.27 per kWh and Bitcoin mining $0.05–0.11, AI inference on H100 GPUs generates $1.27–3.67 per kWh.
Recent deals confirm the rush for power infrastructure. Riot Platforms leases space to AMD; TeraWulf bought an old Kentucky aluminum plant for its grid; NYDIG secured a New York site for its cheap hydropower to mine Bitcoin. As AI giants like Anthropic, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon aggressively expand, they now directly compete with crypto miners for the same industrial power resources, often outbidding them. This has led to a decline in Bitcoin's global hash rate and a wave of miner conversions to AI data centers.
This "digital resource curse" extends globally. Gulf nations, long offering subsidized power to attract heavy industry like aluminum, are now pivoting to become AI and cloud computing hubs—exporting computational power instead of physical commodities. Similarly, Bhutan halted its sovereign Bitcoin mining to sell hydropower directly to India for a steadier return.
The frontier is space. Projects like Starcloud plan orbital solar-powered data centers, leveraging constant sunlight and natural cooling, with Bitcoin mining as a secondary use for surplus power. Even consumer brands are transforming; Allbirds shifted from footwear to AI infrastructure, causing its stock to surge.
Meanwhile, crypto projects like Bittensor, Render, and Akash propose a decentralized alternative, creating markets to aggregate distributed, idle computing resources from individual hardware.
The underlying infrastructure—the power grid—remains constant. As profit margins shift, the facilities built upon it will continue to evolve, from aluminum to Bitcoin to AI and beyond, always chasing the highest yield per kilowatt-hour, whether in Texas, Abu Dhabi, or low Earth orbit.
marsbit1h ago
