Via ncnewsline.com
The Bit Digital spinoff is converting a former textile factory into a high-density GPU campus, with plans to scale to 200MW of power capacity
WhiteFiber Inc., a Nasdaq-listed subsidiary of Bitcoin miner Bit Digital, is betting big on North Carolina real estate as part of its transformation from crypto mining outfit to AI infrastructure provider. The company acquired a 96-acre former textile manufacturing facility in Madison, NC, for $45 million in cash on May 20, with contingent payments that could push the total price tag to roughly $60 million.
The extra payments depend on whether Duke Energy hits certain power delivery milestones. In other words, WhiteFiber is only paying full price if it actually gets the electricity it needs, a structuring choice that shifts some infrastructure risk back to the seller.
From looms to GPUs #
The site, dubbed NC-1, sits approximately 100 miles from both Raleigh and Charlotte. WhiteFiber plans to retrofit the industrial property into a data center campus purpose-built for artificial intelligence and high-performance computing workloads.
The initial phase targets 24 MW of operational capacity by late 2025 or early 2026. WhiteFiber has secured agreements for a total of 99 MW at the site, with the potential to scale all the way to 200 MW as infrastructure approvals come through.
The facility is being designed to meet Tier 3 standards, the industry benchmark for uptime and redundancy that guarantees 99.982% availability. WhiteFiber is also targeting a power usage effectiveness (PUE) ratio of 1.3, which measures how efficiently a data center uses energy. A PUE of 1.0 would mean every watt goes directly to computing. At 1.3, about 23% of total energy consumption goes to cooling and other overhead.
An $865 million anchor tenant #
WhiteFiber isn’t 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 approximately $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 own workloads.
The crypto-to-AI pipeline #
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), and 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.
What to watch #
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 US 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.
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