US aluminum company Alcoa Corp is looking to sell many of its smelting sites to data center developers.

In comments first reported by Reuters, Alcoa CEO Bill Oplinger this week told the BMO Global Metals, Mining and Critical Minerals Conference in Florida that the company is in the process of closing several deals for idle or curtailed sites.

“We have ten sites that we're focused on selling into that space," Oplinger said. "We think we'll have the first sale in the first half of this year. There are two that could follow quickly after that."

Full details of which plants are up for sale and which companies might buy them haven’t been shared.

Brownfield industrial sites, including smelting plants and steelworks, often make good candidates for redevelopment into data centers due to their existing transmission infrastructure and favorable zoning.

One former Alcoa smelting plant is already in the midst of being converted into a data center park. In Maryland, TPG Real Estate Partners (TREP) is developing a 2,100-acre, gigawatt-scale data center park some 25 miles (40.2km) north of Ashburn in Adamstown, Frederick County.

In development since 2021, the Frederick development is based on the site of the former Alcoa Eastalco Works aluminum plant. Aligned, Amazon, and Rowan Digital are known customers of the park.

In Kentucky, another aluminum plant is set to become a data center campus. Century Aluminum Company recently sold its site in Hawesville to an affiliate of US data center developer TeraWulf. The 750-acre site has approximately 480MW of existing power capacity, with the potential to expand further over time. The plant was acquired for a reported $200 million, with Century retaining a non-controlling minority equity stake in the project of approximately 6.8 percent.

Idle since 2020, Alcoa closed its Intalco Smelter in Washington in 2023 with plans to demolish the site, ready for redevelopment. Its Wenatchee Smelter, also in Washington State, closed in 2021.

Alcoa's smelter in Warrick, Indiana, closed in March of 2016. It was partially restarted in 2017, and curtailed again in 2022.

The company's Massena East Smelter in New York closed in 2014, though its Massena West remains in operation.

Several other Alcoa plants globally have seen curtailment in recent years.