WhiteFiber, a Bit Digital spinoff, buys a former textile mill for $45M, with $15M in earn-outs tied to Duke Energy power delivery. The site will host AI data centers.
WhiteFiber Inc., a Nasdaq-listed subsidiary of Bitcoin miner Bit Digital, is turning a former textile factory in North Carolina into a high-density GPU campus. The company paid $45 million in cash on May 20 for a 96-acre site in Madison, N.C., with contingent payments that could lift the total to roughly $60 million.
The extra money depends on whether Duke Energy hits certain power delivery milestones. WhiteFiber structured the deal so it only pays full price if the utility actually delivers the electricity on schedule, a way to shift some infrastructure risk back to the seller.
The property, called NC-1, sits about 100 miles from both Raleigh and Charlotte. WhiteFiber plans to retrofit the industrial building into a data center designed for artificial intelligence and high-performance computing. The first phase targets 24 megawatts of operational capacity by late 2025 or early 2026. WhiteFiber has secured agreements for 99 MW total at the site, with room to scale to 200 MW as approvals come through.
The facility is being built to Tier 3 standards, the industry benchmark for uptime and redundancy that guarantees 99.982% availability. WhiteFiber is also aiming for a power usage effectiveness (PUE) ratio of 1.3, meaning about 23% of total energy consumption will go to cooling and overhead. A PUE of 1.0 would mean every watt goes directly to computing.
WhiteFiber is not building on spec and hoping customers show up. The company has already locked in a 10-year colocation agreement with Nscale, an AI cloud computing company, covering 40 MW of capacity. That contract is valued at roughly $865 million.
The colocation model means WhiteFiber provides the physical infrastructure, power, cooling, and connectivity, while tenants like Nscale bring their own servers and manage their workloads.
WhiteFiber’s lineage tells a familiar story in the digital infrastructure world. The company was carved out of Bit Digital’s high-performance computing business. Bit Digital itself is a publicly traded Bitcoin miner (Nasdaq: BTBT). The decision to spin off HPC operations into a separate entity reflects a strategic bet that AI infrastructure will generate better returns than proof-of-work mining.
WhiteFiber’s retrofitting approach, converting existing industrial sites rather than building from scratch, is designed to compress deployment timelines. New data center construction can take 18 to 36 months. Repurposing a building that already has structural bones, road access, and utility connections can shave months off that schedule.
The biggest variable in WhiteFiber’s plan remains power delivery. The entire earn-out structure of the NC-1 acquisition is tied to Duke Energy’s ability to deliver electricity on schedule. Utility interconnection delays have become one of the most common bottlenecks in the U.S. data center buildout, with some projects facing wait times of two years or more for grid connections.
The Nscale contract covers 40 MW of the potential 200 MW buildout, meaning WhiteFiber will need additional tenants to fill the campus at full scale. The company said it continues to evaluate the DUK stock page for power delivery updates.
WhiteFiber’s share price closed at $12.34 on Friday, up 1.2% on the week. The acquisition is expected to close by the end of the third quarter.
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