Texas Tech's New Scoreboard Sponsor Also Mines the Bit(watt)s 🤠

Galaxy Digital, the Nasdaq-listed trading, asset-management and data-center firm (ticker: GLXY), will rename Texas Tech University's football stadium "Galaxy Stadium" beginning with the 2026 season under a 15-year, more than $70 million naming-rights agreement announced Friday. The venue, currently known as Jones AT&T Stadium, will debut its new identity on Sept. 5 when the Red Raiders host Abilene Christian, fresh off their Big 12 title and College Football Playoff appearance.

As part of the deal, Galaxy becomes the official data-center and digital-assets partner of Texas Tech Athletics, with branding across football and men's and women's basketball, plus name, image and likeness opportunities for student-athletes through "branded activation campaigns and original content." Athletics director Kirby Hocutt said the partnership "will have a lasting impact on Texas Tech Athletics." Galaxy CEO Mike Novogratz tied the sponsorship to the company's Helios data-center campus in nearby Dickens County, which has 1.6 gigawatts of approved capacity for high-performance computing. "At our Helios campus in nearby Dickens County, we're building the infrastructure that powers the code economy," Novogratz said, adding that Galaxy plans to hire locally and "be a good neighbor."

The naming-rights push extends Galaxy's broader pivot from crypto trading into AI and high-performance-computing infrastructure. The company reported a $482 million quarterly loss last year, and analysts at Bernstein have described Bitcoin miners and crypto-native firms as "unlikely power brokers" in the AI infrastructure race, a category in which Helios ranks among the largest North American buildouts. Critics have raised concerns about water use and grid strain on drought-prone West Texas, and Galaxy's closed-loop water system is expected to face scrutiny as the campus scales.

Separately, Citadel Securities has invested $400 million in Crypto.com at a $20 billion valuation, the Singapore-based exchange's first institutional funding round, announced Thursday. Founded in 2016, Crypto.com said the capital will accelerate its push into tokenized securities and derivatives. In another sign of institutional adoption, Morgan Stanley has launched spot cryptocurrency trading on its E*TRADE platform, broadening retail-accessible crypto markets through one of the largest U.S. brokerage networks.