Galaxy Digital acquired the Helios bitcoin mining facility for $65 million in late 2022 from Argo Blockchain, a U.K.-listed miner days from insolvency. The asset now carries a $4.5 billion enterprise valuation after Galaxy redirected Helios's GPU infrastructure from proof-of-work mining to hyperscale AI inference hosting. The buyer and terms remain undisclosed. Galaxy booked the exit last week.
Helios ran as a 200-megawatt facility in West Texas, stocked with high-density GPUs originally deployed for Bitcoin hashing. When Argo hit a liquidity wall in Q4 2022—Bitcoin below $17,000, energy costs spiking—Galaxy stepped in with a structured rescue that included equipment, real estate, and power contracts. The pivot began in mid-2023. Galaxy replaced mining firmware with orchestration layers for large language model inference and fine-tuning, then signed multi-year capacity agreements with three hyperscalers and two frontier AI labs. By Q1 2024, Helios was running at 92% utilization on inference workloads, according to Galaxy's quarterly disclosure. The 69x return in under two years ranks among the sharpest asset transformations in digital infrastructure.
The exit reflects the divergence between bitcoin mining economics and AI compute pricing. Argo paid roughly $800 per kilowatt to build Helios in 2021. Galaxy's basis after the distressed buyout came in near $325 per kilowatt. Hyperscale AI customers now pay $2.10 to $2.80 per GPU-hour for H100-class inference capacity under long-term contracts, versus bitcoin mining's spot-market exposure to hash difficulty and block subsidies. Galaxy's CFO noted the facility generated $340 million in trailing twelve-month revenue before the sale, implying a 13.2x revenue multiple at exit. Bitcoin mining facilities with comparable power envelopes trade closer to 3.5x revenue when sold as going concerns.
The deal arrives as hyperscalers and AI labs scramble for GPU capacity outside the three-year equipment queues at NVIDIA's Tier-1 partners. Galaxy sidestepped that queue by acquiring an already-energized site with existing transformers, cooling systems, and fiber backhaul. The only retrofits: swapping PSU configurations and deploying InfiniBand fabrics for inter-GPU communication. Sources familiar with the transaction say the buyer is a private infrastructure consortium backed by a Middle Eastern sovereign fund and a U.S. pension allocator, both of whom see power-secured GPU sites as the new tower-and-spectrum play. Two more distressed bitcoin sites in Texas and Wyoming are now circulating among the same buyer group, with asking prices near $900 per kilowatt despite remaining configured for proof-of-work.
Operators should track whether Galaxy redeploys the proceeds into additional distressed miner rescues or pivots toward direct AI-lab partnerships. Novogratz's team has met with OpenAI and Anthropic in recent weeks, per two people briefed on the conversations. Watch also for sovereign wealth funds entering the secondary market for stranded mining infrastructure—Abu Dhabi's Mubadala and Singapore's GIC have both commissioned feasibility studies on bitcoin-to-inference conversions in jurisdictions with sub-$0.04/kWh power. The window for sub-$500/kW rescue acquisitions likely closes by mid-2025 as the miner distress cycle fades and purpose-built AI data centers come online.
Galaxy filed the sale disclosure on March 14. The consortium takes possession in sixty days.