# Galaxy Digital A diversified **merchant bank for digital assets** founded by [[Mike Novogratz]] in 2018 — trading, asset management, investment banking, and mining, now increasingly reoriented around **leasing data-center power to the AI industry**. Galaxy is the piece the [[Cryptocurrency Sector]] MOC had explicitly flagged as missing; it belongs in the vault as a **$1M donor to the [[2025 Trump Inaugural Fund]]** that gave while carrying an active SEC settlement track, and as a live case study in the 2026 **crypto-to-AI-infrastructure pivot**. ## Corporate profile | Field | Detail | |---|---| | **Founded** | 2018 by [[Mike Novogratz]] | | **Headquarters** | New York, New York | | **Listing** | Nasdaq: **GLXY** (from May 2025) | | **Prior domicile** | Redomiciled from the Cayman Islands to Delaware, May 2025 | | **TSX** | Delisted from the Toronto Stock Exchange, early 2026 | | **Lines of business** | Trading, asset management, investment banking, mining, and AI data-center hosting | Novogratz planned a crypto hedge fund for late 2017, shelved it when the market turned, and stood up Galaxy in 2018 as a full-stack digital-assets bank at a time when most of Wall Street treated Bitcoin as a punchline. The **May 2025** redomicile-and-Nasdaq-listing was the firm's graduation into mainstream U.S. capital markets, part of the same 2025 legitimization wave that produced the [[Gemini]] IPO and [[Coinbase]]'s S&P 500 entry. ## The AI-landlord pivot Galaxy's second act is its most consequential. The firm has been converting its **Helios** campus in West Texas — originally built for Bitcoin mining — into **AI data-center capacity**, signing multi-year power-and-hosting agreements that Bloomberg characterized as turning Galaxy into an **"AI landlord."** Coverage has framed the buildout as a **$1B+ AI-power business**, and Forbes described the underlying trade as one that could ultimately net Novogratz around **$20 billion**. This makes Galaxy a clean example of a broader 2026 phenomenon: **crypto-mining companies morphing into AI infrastructure**, redeploying the cheap-power-plus-cooling-plus-real-estate stack that mining required toward the far larger AI compute demand. It also sets up the irony below. ## The "human commoditization" statement In **July 2026**, on the SALT podcast, Novogratz endorsed [[Alex Karp]]'s combative CNBC interview as one of "the most honest things" he'd seen on television in years, reading it as "an indictment of the AI business model" that would "lead to some sort of human commoditization" — the labs absorbing everyone's data as the product. Karp's underlying attack targeted the token-based pricing of [[OpenAI]] and [[Anthropic]], which he accused of overcharging enterprises while harvesting the proprietary data used to later compete with them. The tension worth noting: Galaxy is now **leasing the power that runs those very labs**, so its founder is simultaneously a beneficiary of the AI buildout and one of its more candid critics. See [[Mike Novogratz - AI commoditizing humans]] for the receipt. ## Political money and regulatory posture - **[[2025 Trump Inaugural Fund]]: $1,000,000.** Galaxy sits in the crypto donor cluster (alongside [[Ripple]], [[Coinbase]], [[Kraken]], Crypto.com, Paradigm) — nearly all of which gave while carrying active or recently-resolved SEC matters. Galaxy's line in the vault's inaugural ledger reads **"active settlement track."** - The donate-into-a-pending-matter pattern is the [[Crypto-Political Machine]] thesis in miniature: industry money flows to the incoming administration while enforcement risk is outstanding, and the [[Paul Atkins]] SEC subsequently softens the sector's enforcement posture. Cause-and-effect is contested; the temporal correlation is documented. - Galaxy is not a Trump-family entity and Novogratz is not a MAGA figure — its inclusion is about the **money-and-regulation map**, not movement politics. ## Significance - **Closes a named gap** in the [[Cryptocurrency Sector]] coverage map, which listed "Galaxy Digital/Mike Novogratz" among the sector's missing pages. - A **canonical crypto-to-AI-infrastructure conversion** story — the mining-power stack redeployed for AI compute — that connects the [[Cryptocurrency Sector]] and AI-buildout threads. - A **$1M inaugural donor** whose SEC settlement track makes it part of the crypto pay-for-access pattern the vault tracks through [[Paul Atkins]] and the [[Crypto-Political Machine]]. ## Cross-references - Founder & CEO: [[Mike Novogratz]] - Sector context: [[Cryptocurrency Sector]], [[Crypto-Political Machine]] - Political money: [[2025 Trump Inaugural Fund]], [[Paul Atkins]] - AI-model critique nexus: [[Alex Karp]], [[OpenAI]], [[Anthropic]] - Quote: [[Mike Novogratz - AI commoditizing humans]]