At Trump’s side on the course was his son Eric, who oversees his father’s golf empire as executive vice president of the Trump Organization. But a few months earlier and an ocean away, Eric had inked a remarkable series of deals in a very different industry, becoming a major player in a complex network of cryptocurrency ventures that could become a vast new source of family wealth. Key to his plans: a brand new bitcoin mine powered by a wind farm in the Texas Panhandle and a merger with a crypto company that once billed itself as “a pioneer in the realm of zero-emissions bitcoin mining.”

The bitcoin mine—known as the Vega Data Center—is a 162,000-square-foot building that will be packed to the rafters with thousands of high-end computers, cooled with water. The computers’ task is, quite literally, to print money. They’ll churn their way through increasingly complex algorithms, which, as they’re solved, release new bitcoins into the world. Bitcoin, the world’s marquee cryptocurrency, now has a market price well above $100,000; it’s a potentially lucrative project, but an enormously energy-hungry one.

That’s where wind power comes in—the Vega center was built over the last year next to the Canadian Breaks wind farm, a 200-megawatt facility in North Texas. Since 2019, the wind farm had supplied inexpensive green energy to Texas’ power grid. But last year, the farm’s owners agreed instead to sell the facility’s energy to a subsidiary of a company called Hut 8, which owns that new bitcoin mine. The deal was a triumph for Hut 8. Crypto mining is profitable only if the electricity it runs on is cheap, and, the company’s CEO told investors, the new mine “benefits from some of the lowest locational wholesale power prices in North America.”