Galaxy Digital Flips 133 MW Switch at Helios for CoreWeave AI Build

Galaxy Digital Holdings delivered the first phase of IT load at its Helios campus in West Texas, transferring 133 megawatts to CoreWeave under a 15-year lease. The facility, one of the larger bitcoin mining sites in the U.S., is being converted to house the AI cloud provider's high-performance computing gear.

The initial power-on covers about a quarter of the 526 MW CoreWeave contracted across three phases at Helios. Galaxy said projected annual revenue from the arrangement tops $1 billion once fully built out.

CoreWeave, which runs GPU clusters for AI training and inference, has been locking down power supply at former energy-intensive industrial sites as data-center space tightens. The Helios campus sits in the Permian Basin, where cheap natural gas and existing transmission infrastructure make large-scale draws feasible.

Galaxy's pivot from self-mining to landlord at Helios mirrors a broader shift across the crypto-mining sector. Riot Platforms, Bitfarms, and others have signed similar co-location deals with AI firms or converted portions of their fleets to hosting. The economics are straightforward: hosting yields a more predictable lease return than mining revenue, which fluctuates with Bitcoin's price and network difficulty.

CoreWeave's total power procurement across sites now exceeds 1.5 GW. The company has raised north of $12 billion in debt and equity, much of it backed by GPU collateral, to fund the buildout. The Helios campus is one of several large-scale conversions from bitcoin infrastructure to AI compute.

The remaining 393 MW of contracted capacity at Helios is slated to come online through 2026. Galaxy has said it plans to retain some of the site's mining footprint for itself, though the CoreWeave deal consumes the bulk of available power.

A representative for Galaxy declined to comment on whether the company is marketing additional MW to other AI or HPC tenants.

For CoreWeave, the West Texas delivery is a test of operational scaling outside the traditional data-center hubs of Northern Virginia and the West Coast. Latency to major network peering points is higher in West Texas than in Ashburn or Santa Clara, the power is cheaper and more accessible than constrained markets like Loudoun County.

The conversion timeline matters for the broader AI infrastructure thesis. CoreWeave's $12 billion in financing is largely secured against GPU hardware, meaning the Helios buildout must hit its power-on milestones to keep lenders comfortable. A 133 MW delivery in Phase 1 shows execution is on track. The remaining 393 MW, scheduled through 2026, will test whether the Permian Basin can support the kind of dense compute clusters that hyperscalers deploy in Northern Virginia.

Galaxy's own balance sheet benefits from the shift. Mining revenue at Helios was subject to Bitcoin's price swings and the April halving, which cut block rewards in half. The CoreWeave lease replaces that variable income with a contracted stream. Galaxy's stock has tracked the transition, rising roughly 50% year-to-date as investors price in the more predictable cash flows.

The deal also highlights a structural bottleneck in AI compute: power availability, not GPU supply, is becoming the binding constraint. CoreWeave's 1.5 GW procurement pipeline is large by crypto-mining standards, small compared to the 5-10 GW campuses that Microsoft and Google are planning. West Texas offers cheap power, the transmission links to the ERCOT grid are already strained. Any further buildout at Helios beyond the current 526 MW would require new transmission capacity, a multi-year permitting process.

Galaxy's next catalyst is the Phase 2 power-on, expected in late 2025. CoreWeave's lenders will be watching the same date.