Galaxy announced on July 5, 2026 that it has completed Phase I of its Helios data center campus in West Texas, delivering 133 megawatts (MW) of critical IT load to CoreWeave, the AI-focused cloud provider. Critical IT load refers to the power available to the computing equipment itself — servers and GPUs — as distinct from the total power a facility draws for cooling and other overhead.
The completion converts a site that began life as a Bitcoin mining campus into dedicated AI infrastructure under Galaxy’s long-term lease arrangement with CoreWeave, one of the most prominent examples of the crypto-to-AI conversion trend reshaping the data center market.
Executive Summary
Galaxy, the digital assets and data center infrastructure firm, has finished the first phase of its Helios campus buildout and handed over 133 MW of critical IT load to its anchor tenant CoreWeave. Phase I completion moves the project from promise to delivery: Helios is now an operating revenue-generating AI data center rather than a conversion story on a slide deck.
The milestone matters beyond Galaxy. Helios is the flagship test case for whether former cryptocurrency mining sites — which come with grid interconnections and power contracts already in place — can be economically retrofitted to the far more demanding standards of AI training and inference infrastructure. Delivering a first phase at this scale suggests the model can work, at least for sites with strong power positions.
For CoreWeave, the delivery adds substantial contracted capacity at a time when access to powered land and energized shells — not GPUs — is widely seen as the binding constraint on AI cloud growth.
Why Crypto Sites Became AI Real Estate
The most valuable asset in data center development today is not land or buildings but secured power: a grid interconnection agreement and the megawatts behind it. Bitcoin mining operators spent the late 2010s and early 2020s locking up exactly that, often in low-cost power markets like West Texas. When AI demand exploded, those interconnections became worth far more serving GPUs than mining rigs, because AI tenants sign long-term leases at data center economics rather than riding volatile crypto margins.
Galaxy’s Helios campus, acquired from a Bitcoin mining operator, is the highest-profile execution of that arbitrage. The conversion is not trivial — AI facilities require far denser power delivery, liquid or advanced air cooling, and enterprise-grade redundancy that mining sites never needed — but the timeline still beats greenfield development, where new grid interconnection requests can queue for years.
What 133 MW Actually Buys
133 MW of critical IT load is a substantial block of capacity by any historical standard — a few years ago it would have ranked among the larger single-tenant deployments in the world. In the AI era it is best understood as a first tranche: large frontier training clusters are increasingly specified in the hundreds of megawatts, and operators including Galaxy have discussed multi-phase expansion at Helios well beyond Phase I.
Because the load is contracted to a single tenant, the economics resemble a triple-net real estate deal more than a retail colocation business: predictable lease revenue over a long term, with Galaxy carrying development and delivery risk and CoreWeave carrying utilization risk. That structure has become the dominant template for AI data center finance because lenders can underwrite the lease.
Winners, Losers, and the Competitive Field
The clearest winners are holders of energized or near-energized power positions — converted mining sites, utilities with spare interconnection capacity, and developers who queued early. CoreWeave benefits by adding capacity faster than greenfield timelines would allow, supporting its competition with hyperscale clouds for AI workloads. The pressure lands on developers still waiting in interconnection queues, and on regions whose grids cannot absorb gigawatt-class requests.
The open competitive question is durability. Conversion sites tend to sit in remote, power-rich locations, which suits training workloads that tolerate latency. If the market shifts toward inference — which favors proximity to users — the value of remote megawatts could be repriced. Phase I’s completion answers the execution question; it does not settle the location question.
Background
Helios began as one of the larger Bitcoin mining campuses in the United States before Galaxy acquired the site and redirected it toward AI and high-performance computing. Galaxy subsequently signed long-term lease agreements making CoreWeave the campus’s anchor tenant, with capacity to be delivered in phases — Phase I, now complete, being the first.
The conversion sits inside a broader industry shift: as demand for AI compute outran the pace of new grid connections, sites with existing power infrastructure — many of them crypto mining facilities in Texas and the Mountain West — became prime targets for repurposing. Helios is widely watched as the leading proof point for whether that playbook delivers at scale.
Source: Galaxy Completes Phase I of Its Helios Data Center Campus, Delivering 133 Megawatts of Critical IT Load to CoreWeave — PR Newswire press release, July 5, 2026, announcing Phase I completion at Galaxy’s West Texas AI campus.