Written by: Thejaswini M A
Compiled by: Luffy, Foresight News
Drive about an hour northeast from Austin, Texas, past barbecue joints and barren scrubland, and you'll arrive in Rockdale, Texas. If you roll down the window before the town's outline comes into view, you'll hear a steady roar, like the rumble of a jet engine idling on the tarmac.
Rockdale, built around an old aluminum smelter, now hosts North America's largest concentration of Bitcoin mining operations, with industry leaders like Riot Platforms and Bitdeer having set up shop there. Investigations by The New York Times and Al Jazeera have long documented this soundscape: tens of thousands of mining rigs paired with industrial fans running at full throttle to prevent equipment from overheating and shutting down in the Texas heat.
Follow the roar into the former plant of Alcoa, a symbol of 20th-century heavy industry. No trace of aluminum production remains in the vast industrial yard. Inside a massive metal warehouse, countless thick copper cables and industrial server racks are arranged in grids. Computer equipment is fully submerged in churning synthetic coolant.
Originally used for Bitcoin mining, the equipment here is now being gradually replaced with AMD chips, transitioning to handle artificial intelligence model training workloads.
Forget debating whether AI is a bubble or Bitcoin is in terminal decline. This industrial succession is just a surface manifestation. The companies securing leases for these sites see it clearly: the true core asset is the electrical infrastructure. This is now an industry-wide consensus.
If you're still wondering why, the underlying logic stems from the disparity in revenue per kilowatt-hour of electricity (calculated at real-time London Metal Exchange prices):
- Aluminum Smelting: Each kWh can generate $0.17–$0.27 in gross revenue.
- Bitcoin Mining: At current rates, each kWh yields only $0.05–$0.11.
- Running AI Inference Tasks on H100 GPUs: Each kWh yields a whopping $1.27–$3.67.
When electricity was cheap, producing aluminum made sense. As margins in the aluminum industry were squeezed, Bitcoin mining became the new use case for low-cost power. By 2026, with Bitcoin prices depressed, AI workloads have become the unequivocally better choice.
Three recent transactions vividly illustrate the industry-wide scramble for power resources, whether for cryptocurrency mining or AI compute.
Riot, with its large site in Rockdale, hasn't limited itself to Bitcoin mining. It has leased part of its space and power to chip giant AMD for building an AI data center. Simply by subleasing electricity and space, the company stands to earn hundreds of millions of dollars.
TeraWulf has embarked on a major expansion, spending $200 million to acquire the century-old Century Aluminum plant in Hawesville, Kentucky. The core reason for choosing this location is the plant's existing, robust high-capacity electrical infrastructure. The company plans to dismantle the old production equipment and build a large-scale data center campus leveraging the ready-made power grid.
NYDIG set its sights on the former Massena East industrial site in New York State. The site had been idle for years but offers direct access to 435 megawatts of cheap hydroelectric power from the St. Lawrence River. While peers pivot to AI, NYDIG secured this location solely to lock in low-cost hydropower to continue its Bitcoin mining operations. The industry has long since stopped building sites from scratch; it now competes for existing power hubs.
Over the past two decades, Bitcoin miners have roamed the globe in search of cheap power: at remote hydroelectric dams in Washington state, at flare gas sites in North Dakota's oil fields, in clusters of old industrial grids in upstate New York. The industry has honed a mature set of supporting capabilities: 24/7 high-load power management, industrial-grade cooling solutions, long-term, low-cost power contracts.
The rising AI firms happen to need these ready-made resources and have deeper pockets.
Anthropic is aggressively locking down power resources. Microsoft, Google, and Amazon are also on a data center construction spree, with power infrastructure buildout struggling to keep pace with new facility deployment. The three tech giants are now directly competing with Bitcoin miners for the same pool of industrial power resources. Where miners once competed against each other for power, they now find themselves at a disadvantage against the tech titans.
Data from early 2026 confirms the industry's predicament. Bitcoin's global network hash rate declined for the first time in six years. While the current cost to mine a single Bitcoin is around $88,000, for most of May this year, the price has hovered around $77,000. Miners operating at standard electricity rates are losing money on every coin they produce.
A collective pivot has followed. Companies like Hive, Hut 8, TeraWulf, and Iren are dismantling mining rigs and converting facilities into AI server rooms. CoreWeave has completely exited crypto mining, fully transitioning to AI cloud services. MARA acquired a French tech company to shift its business focus. Those positioned as "power operators," holding valuable electricity resources, are surviving. Miners solely focused on the crypto space are in crisis.
Energy analysts have dubbed this phenomenon the "digital resource curse": nations and companies are increasingly realizing that simply controlling cheap electricity yields higher returns than developing new technologies themselves.
The Gulf States grasped this logic early. For the past six decades, they have maintained ultra-low electricity tariffs: Kuwait has kept residential rates stable at $0.007 per kWh since 1966; in Abu Dhabi, the combined cost of production and delivery is about $0.087 per kWh, but it's sold to residents for just $0.014. Low-cost power was originally a tool for industrial policy, attracting energy-intensive industries like aluminum smelting, petrochemicals, and steel to the desert.
Today, that same cheap power that once supported heavy industry has found a new user: the data center. Saudi Arabia has established a sovereign AI investment agency, HUMAIN, investing tens of billions in tech infrastructure. The UAE is building a 5-gigawatt AI park, attracting companies like OpenAI, Oracle, and Nvidia. The grid that once powered aluminum smelters now powers AI compute. The planned NEOM Oxagon, originally conceived as a floating industrial city, has been repurposed into a $5 billion AI data center cluster powered by wind and solar.
The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace noted: Cloud computing has become the Gulf's "new aluminum." Instead of exporting physical commodities, the region is now converting fossil fuels and solar energy into compute power and exporting it via the internet.
It's not just the Middle East. Bhutan's case is equally telling.
Bhutan once possessed some of the world's cheapest hydropower. Its state-backed Bitcoin mining project was once hailed as a model of sovereign mining, holding a peak of 13,000 BTC. That has now dwindled to 3,100 BTC, and mining operations ceased over a year ago. The country's hydropower is now sold directly to the Indian grid.
The calculus mirrors that of the old American aluminum plant: Is Bitcoin mining still the best use of our electricity? When the answer was yes, Bhutan mined. When selling power to India offered a more stable return without the volatility risk of cryptocurrency, the power flowed to its neighbor.
Similarly, Starcloud raised $200 million to plan an orbital solar-powered data center. They recently trained the first AI model in space using H100 GPUs and are seeking approval to launch 88,000 satellites. While the project retains a Bitcoin mining operation, it is only a secondary component: the in-orbit solar panels generate continuous power, and when the AI compute queue is idle, the surplus electricity is used for crypto mining.
Low Earth orbit offers unique advantages for power generation: constant sunlight, no land use, and the cold of space negates the need for extensive cooling equipment. Over the past two decades, launch costs have fallen by 95%.
SpaceX is also deeply involved in the power-and-compute calculus. According to its latest IPO filing, the company's Colossus 1 data center in Memphis, Tennessee, has its entire compute capacity exclusively leased by Anthropic under a contract running until May 2029, valued at over $40 billion. This single deal alone brings SpaceX $1.25 billion in monthly revenue. This data center was also converted from an old appliance factory, mirroring the transformation model seen in Rockdale's aluminum plant.
Amidst all this industrial churn, perhaps the most unexpected pivot is that of Allbirds. The sustainable shoe brand, once valued at $4 billion, saw its stock price plummet 98% as the consumer brand bubble burst. With its core business struggling, the company, armed with cash and a public listing, decisively pivoted entirely to operating AI compute infrastructure. Its stock price subsequently surged 350%. The market voted: operating servers and trading in power/compute is far more profitable today than the traditional consumer sector.
Meanwhile, crypto projects like Bittensor, Render, and Akash are charting a different path: not building large, centralized facilities, but aggregating the world's distributed, idle compute.
Bittensor has built a compute marketplace where, underpinned by a fixed-supply token system, various AI models compete to provide answers; the project also halved its daily token issuance in December 2025. Render incentivizes users to share idle GPU resources for AI tasks. Akash rents out cloud compute, claiming prices up to 85% lower than Amazon Web Services.
This distributed compute model is gaining attention. At Nvidia's GTC conference in 2026, CEO Jensen Huang compared Bittensor to the classic internet project Folding@home. The latter was born from the idea of leveraging idle home computers worldwide, making dormant devices productive; Bittensor uses crypto tokens as an incentive to aggregate the compute of idle gaming PCs and old mining rigs.
Looking at the big picture, from the roar of industrial fans in Rockdale to sun-chasing satellites in orbit, a massive reconfiguration around physical assets is underway. For the companies involved, the only rule is to chase profit margins. I predict that a decade from now, these compute facilities may once again be emptied and repurposed for the next generation of emerging industries. The underground electrical transmission lines, however, will remain unchanged from beginning to end.
Whoever controls the cheapest electricity decides what the compute is used for. This logic has already played out in Texas, Bhutan, and Abu Dhabi. And 250 miles above the Earth's surface, it will hold true as well.
