Breaking news! American aluminum plants are transforming into AI empires, and a massive wealth transfer centered on electricity is underway—if retail investors don’t understand it soon, it’ll be too late!

One hour drive northeast from Austin, Texas, passing by barbecue joints and desolate shrublands, you arrive in Rockdale, Texas.
If you roll down the window before seeing the town’s outline, you’ll hear a roar, like jet engines running in place, deep and continuous.

Rockdale relies on an old aluminum plant to host North America’s largest $BTC mining cluster, with leading companies like Riot Platforms and Bitdeer settling here.
Many investigative reports have long documented this sound: tens of thousands of mining machines with industrial fans working tirelessly to prevent overheating and shutdown during Texas’s scorching heat.
Following the roar into the former aluminum smelting plant of U.S. Aluminum, the once 20th-century heavy industry factory shows no traces of aluminum production anymore.
Inside the vast metal warehouse, countless thick copper cables and industrial racks are arranged in crisscross patterns, with computer equipment fully immersed in swirling synthetic coolant.
Originally used for $BTC mining, the equipment is gradually being replaced with AMD chips, transitioning into artificial intelligence model training operations.

No need to worry about whether AI is a bubble or $BTC is heading toward decline—these industry shifts are just surface phenomena.
Companies holding lease rights to these sites see the core asset clearly: power lines.
This has become an industry consensus.
If you still wonder why, the logic behind it stems from the profit margin per unit of electricity (calculated at real-time prices on the London Metal Exchange):
Aluminum smelting: $0.17–$0.27 gross revenue per kilowatt-hour;
$BTC mining: at current market conditions, only $0.05–$0.11 per kilowatt-hour;
Running AI inference tasks with H100 GPUs: up to $1.27–$3.67 per kilowatt-hour.
When electricity costs are low, aluminum production is a rational choice;
When aluminum industry profits are squeezed, $BTC mining takes over low-cost electricity scenarios.
By 2026, with $BTC prices subdued, AI business will undoubtedly be a better option.

Recent three transactions vividly demonstrate the industry’s frantic scramble for power resources, whether for cryptocurrency mining or AI computing power.
Riot owns large facilities in Rockdale, not limited to $BTC mining, but also leasing part of the space to chip giant AMD for building AI data centers.
Just through leasing out electricity and space, the company can earn hundreds of millions of dollars.
TeraWulf has launched large-scale expansion, investing $200 million to acquire the century-old Century Aluminum plant in Housville, Kentucky.
The key reason for choosing this site is its well-equipped high-capacity power infrastructure.
The company plans to dismantle old production equipment and build a large data center campus relying on the existing grid.
NYDIG has targeted an old factory in eastern Massena, New York.
This site has been idle for years but can connect directly to the St. Lawrence River to access 435 MW of cheap hydroelectric power.
In an environment where peers are shifting toward AI, NYDIG acquired this site solely to lock in low-cost hydropower and continue $BTC mining operations.

Today, the industry no longer builds new sites from scratch but competes for existing power hubs.
Over the past two decades, $BTC miners have scoured the globe for cheap electricity: remote hydroelectric stations in Washington State, associated gas emissions from North Dakota oil fields, and old industrial grids in northern New York.
The industry has also developed mature supporting capabilities: 24/7 high-load power operation, industrial-grade cooling solutions, and long-term low-cost power contracts.
Emerging AI companies precisely need these ready resources, backed by stronger financial strength.
Anthropic is locking in large amounts of power; Microsoft, Google, and Amazon are rapidly expanding data centers, with power infrastructure development even lagging behind data center deployment.
The three tech giants are now directly competing with $BTC miners for the same industrial power resources.
In the past, miners competed among themselves for electricity; now, facing competition from tech giants, their disadvantages are evident.

Data from early 2026 confirms the industry’s predicament: the total network hash rate of $BTC has declined for the first time in six years.
Currently, the cost to mine one $BTC is about $88,000, but for most of May this year, the price hovered around $77,000.
Miners operating at regular electricity prices are losing money on each coin mined.
The industry is collectively transforming.
Hive, Hut 8, TeraWulf, Iren, and others are gradually dismantling mining machines to convert into AI server farms;
CoreWeave has completely exited crypto mining to focus on AI cloud services;
MARA has acquired a French tech company, shifting its business focus.
Those with power resources, positioned as “power operators,” survive, while miners solely focused on crypto are facing crisis.

Energy analysts call this phenomenon the “Digital Resource Curse”:
Countries and companies are increasingly discovering that controlling cheap electricity yields far higher returns than developing new technologies.
Gulf nations have long understood this logic.
Over the past sixty years, they have implemented policies of low electricity prices:
Kuwait has kept residential electricity at $0.007 per kWh since 1966;
Abu Dhabi’s total power production and transmission costs are about $0.087 per kWh, with retail prices at only $0.014.
Low-cost electricity was originally a tool to attract investment—drawing high-energy-consuming industries like aluminum, chemicals, and steel to desert regions.
Today, the low-cost power once used for high-energy industries is now being used by data centers.
Saudi Arabia has established a state-owned AI investment firm, HUMAIN, investing billions in tech infrastructure;
UAE is building a 5 GW AI park, attracting companies like OpenAI, Oracle, and Nvidia, with the grid once used for aluminum smelting now fully supporting AI computing.
The NEOM Oxagon project, originally planned as a floating industrial city, has also shifted focus, transforming into a $5 billion AI data center cluster powered by wind and solar.

The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace describes:
Cloud computing has become the “new aluminum industry” for Gulf countries.
They no longer export physical commodities but rely on the internet to convert fossil fuels and solar energy into computational power for export.
Not only the Middle East—cases in Bhutan are also typical.
Bhutan once boasted the world’s lowest-cost hydropower, and its state-led $BTC mining project was seen as a sovereign mining benchmark, with a peak holding of 13,000 $BTC, now reduced to 3,100, and mining operations halted over a year ago.
Its hydropower now directly feeds into the Indian grid.
The reasoning echoes the decision of American aluminum plants: is $BTC mining the best use of electricity?
When the answer is yes, Bhutan continues mining;
When more stable revenue is gained from selling electricity to India without bearing crypto price volatility, the power flows to the neighboring country.

Similarly, Starcloud has raised $200 million to develop orbital solar-powered data centers.
They recently trained the first AI model in space using H100 GPUs and are applying to launch 88,000 satellites.
While maintaining $BTC mining as a subsidiary, the main focus is on space-based solar panels generating continuous power, with surplus electricity used for crypto mining when AI workloads are idle.
Low Earth Orbit offers ideal conditions: uninterrupted sunlight, no land use, and space’s low temperatures save on cooling equipment.
Over the past twenty years, launch costs have dropped 95%.
SpaceX is also deeply involved in the power and computing game.
According to its latest IPO filings, the Colossus 1 data center in Memphis, Tennessee, is exclusively leased to Anthropic, with a contract until May 2029, valued at over $40 billion, generating $1.25 billion monthly revenue for SpaceX.
This data center was also converted from an old electrical factory, similar to Rockdale’s shift from aluminum plant to computing hub.

Throughout this industry transformation, Allbirds’ pivot is one of the most surprising cases.
This sustainable footwear brand peaked at a valuation of $4 billion but plummeted 98% after the consumer brand bubble burst.
With its main business struggling, the company, holding cash flow and a listed entity, decisively shifted to operating AI computing infrastructure, causing its stock to soar 350%.
The market has spoken: operating servers and reselling computing power now yields far higher profits than traditional consumer industries.
Meanwhile, crypto projects like Bittensor, Render, and Akash are taking a different route:
They avoid building large centralized data centers and instead aggregate distributed idle computing power worldwide.
Bittensor has created a marketplace for computing power, using a fixed token supply to incentivize AI models to compete within the platform; it will halve its daily token output in December 2025.
Render encourages users to share idle GPUs for AI tasks;
Akash rents out cloud computing at prices claimed to be 85% lower than Amazon Web Services.
This distributed computing model is gradually gaining attention.

At Nvidia’s 2026 GTC, CEO Jensen Huang compared Bittensor to the classic internet project Folding@home.
The original goal was to activate idle home computers worldwide, creating value from dormant devices;
Bittensor, on the other hand, uses encrypted tokens to incentivize the aggregation of idle gaming consoles and old mining rigs’ computing power.
Looking at the big picture, from the roaring industrial fans of Rockdale to satellites orbiting in pursuit of the sun, a large-scale reconstruction around physical assets is underway.
The only rule for companies involved is to chase profit margins.
I predict that in ten years, these current computing facilities may once again be emptied and repurposed for emerging industries, while the underground power grid will remain unchanged.
Whoever controls the cheapest electricity will determine the use of computing power.
This logic has already proven true in $BTC Texas, Bhutan, and Abu Dhabi—and it will also hold in space, 250 miles above the Earth.