Chaos creates opportunity. Few recognize it in the moment; even fewer are willing to write a large check before the dust settles. Former Goldman Sachs trader Michael Novogratz had no trouble writing the check. What he didn’t yet grasp in December 2022 was how consequential his contrarian, defensive bet would be.
That month, with crypto reeling from the collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX empire and the bankruptcies rippling outward, Novogratz’s Galaxy committed $65 million to acquire a 160-acre bitcoin mining operation in Dickens County, a sparsely populated expanse of Texas about 330 miles northwest of Austin.
“It most likely will be my best investment by a long shot,” says Novogratz, 61.
Alexander Karnyukhin for Forbes
On its face, the deal looked almost willfully mistimed: a major investment in mining infrastructure at precisely the moment the industry was reckoning with its excesses—a toxic stew of bad leverage, bad counterparties and unchallenged assumptions. More than $1.5 trillion worth of digital assets had evaporated that year; bitcoin and ether were both down more than 60%.
Earlier in 2022, as signs of stress began appearing across the industry, Novogratz’s firm grew uneasy about the amount of capital it had tied up in crypto-mining chips housed in third-party data centers. “We got concerned that we had some real sizable capital invested in assets that were sitting in control of people whose credit quality was declining,” recalls Christopher Ferraro, Galaxy’s president and chief investment officer.
The seller, Argo Blockchain, had what Galaxy needed: a site known as Helios on inexpensive land with cheap power and a labor pool in nearby Lubbock. The transaction that followed was neither clean nor simple. It was part bailout, part legal choreography, part financing structure designed to extract the underlying partially built facility while keeping its distressed operator alive long enough to complete the deal.
At the time, Helios looked like a hedge—an exercise in control and risk management during a brutal downturn. It would take more than a year for Novogratz and his team to fully understand they had bought something else entirely.
By late 2023, with bitcoin prices hovering around $38,000, down 40% from their November 2021 high, Novogratz began asking a different question: whether bitcoin mining was the best use of the asset Galaxy had just acquired. A few months later, Novogratz was stuck on a plane with his friend Christopher James, founder of the San Francisco-based activist investment firm Engine No. 1, who gave the billionaire a two-and-a-half-hour lecture on a looming power shortage—one that had little to do with bitcoin and everything to do with artificial intelligence.
Others were waking up to the opportunity. In June 2024, Delaware-based bitcoin miner Core Scientific announced a 12-year, $3.5 billion lease with CoreWeave, one of the fastest-growing AI infrastructure companies in the world. Overnight, crypto mining was no longer being valued as washed-out collateral from a speculative boom, but as scarce power infrastructure with long-duration, contracted revenue.
Novogratz moved quickly. CoreWeave was already a client on Galaxy’s crypto investment banking side, a relationship dating to 2021 when it was an Ethereum miner. In November 2024 Novogratz locked CoreWeave into a 15-year lease for 25% of Helios’ 800-megawatt AI data center capacity. Within a year CoreWeave committed to leasing 100%. Recent approval from Texas’ electricity operator ERCOT will enable Helios to double its capacity to 1.6 gigawatts, making it one of the largest independent data center providers in the U.S. Helios is expected to start generating revenue by this summer, reaching more than $1 billion annually just from CoreWeave. Novogratz now finds himself sitting atop two businesses being propelled by gale-force tailwinds: crypto and AI data centers.
“We were in lots of ways lucky,” Novogratz says. “And in lots of ways smart on how we then prosecuted that luck.”
The third of seven children, Novogratz was born into a military family. Tales of his dramatic Wall Street career are well known. An ROTC scholar and Princeton wrestling champion, he joined Goldman Sachs in 1989 after a stint in the New Jersey National Guard. He started as a salesman before becoming a trader, ultimately running Goldman’s Asian trading desk from Hong Kong. By 1998, he was made partner. The next year Goldman went public, making Novogratz very wealthy. A year later, just after being promoted to president of Goldman Sachs Latin America, Novogratz was forced out—because, as he told the New Yorker, he was “partying like a rock star.”
After rehab in Arizona, Novogratz found his way back to Wall Street, joining NYC private equity firm Fortress Investment Group in 2002 as a partner in charge of a hedge fund specializing in macro trading. Novogratz was so good at it that after Fortress went public in 2007, his fund had $9 billion in assets and he and four other partners became billionaires. But the markets giveth and they taketh: Just a year later, in 2008, the financial crisis decimated Novogratz’s hedge fund and his net worth. The fund eventually recovered, but after a series of wrong bets involving Swiss francs and Brazilian interest rates, Novogratz shut it down for good in 2015. That was about the time he started becoming increasingly fascinated by crypto, reportedly purchasing $7 million worth of bitcoin for as little as $65.
Crypto is a sport built on discomfort. And it rewards the ability to keep coming back. Novogratz, the collegiate wrestler, was perfectly built for it.
“He’s always upbeat no matter what adversity or when something might be going under,” says billionaire Stan Druckenmiller, Novogratz’s longtime fantasy football league mate and George Soros’ former right-hand man.
In 2018, Novogratz launched Galaxy, envisioning it as the Goldman Sachs of crypto. He describes its culture as “three quarters Goldman, one quarter Drexel Burnham”—a reference to Michael Milken’s central role in building a new market for junk bonds, much as Galaxy is on a mission to help build up digital assets.
In an industry crowded with idealistic neophyte investors, Novogratz’s veteran trading chops have paid off. Seventeen months after FTX collapsed, Galaxy raised a $620 million fund in April 2024 to buy its deeply discounted solana holdings. Those income-generating tokens are worth more than $1.2 billion today.
When the crypto winter of 2021-23 kneecapped lending, Galaxy was one of the few firms still standing with enough credibility and capital to step in. It has grown into one of the three largest crypto lenders globally, alongside stablecoin issuer Tether and Ledn, with loan originations exceeding $2 billion in 2025.
More recently, when another prominent trend emerged—public companies copying Michael Saylor’s bitcoin hoarding treasury strategy— Galaxy jumped in to help. It is now the investment banker and treasury manager for more than 20 such firms, which have added roughly $4.5 billion in incremental assets under management, lifting Galaxy’s total to $17 billion, and are generating more than $40 million in recurring fee revenue.
Last year was the most successful in Galaxy’s history. Its stock was listed on Nasdaq in May, and Novogratz’s net worth has since more than doubled to $7 billion. In the third quarter, Galaxy’s net profit surged to $505 million on record trading volumes and digital asset treasury gains.
For all Novogratz’s pivots and plays, his most consequential may well be those vast acres of prairieland in Texas he bought as a hedge. Helios’ location turns out to be almost as important as its scale. The site sits within a designated Qualified Opportunity Zone that was established under President Trump’s 2017 tax cuts and grants a deferral on capital gains taxes for Galaxy.
“Even at this point, the value that we assign to Helios is greater than the value that we currently assign to the company’s crypto platform,” says Benchmark analyst Mark Palmer. That may be an understatement, according to H.C. Wainwright analyst Mike Colonnese, who believes that Helios alone could be worth double Galaxy’s current market capitalization—or more than $20 billion. Adds Palmer: “It stands out as one of the greatest acquisitions in the history of corporate finance.”
But being at the forefront of two nascent, rapidly evolving growth businesses presents unique challenges. “We’re in a complicated place,” Novogratz says. “There will be a time when we will make a real decision. We might end up a holding company. We might end up two separate companies. But the crypto business has to have more scale.”
Ferraro, Novogratz’s CIO, puts it more bluntly. Public markets, he says, prefer simple narratives. Asking investors to understand both digital assets and data centers is a heavy lift, and over time capital markets tend to force clarity. “We’ll be financing the data center with billions of dollars of bank debt with 20-year payoff profiles,” Ferraro adds. “That’s super different from volatile crypto. If and when we get to a point where we’re not getting fair value with both businesses under the hood, it would be wrong not to be thinking about separating them.”
What’s In A Name?
Michael Novogratz, who was 12 when the first Star Wars hit theaters, named Galaxy— as in “a galaxy far, far away”—as a nod to the space epic. He’s not the only one who couldn’t resist nerding out when naming a company. A few other big brands that were inspired by sci-fi or fantasy works:
Anduril
Named for the famed sword in The Lord of the Rings, the $30.5 billion (valuation) defense startup makes unmanned fighter jets, AI- powered combat helmets and other weapons of the future.
US Robotics
This early computer modem maker took its name from U.S. Robot and Mechanical Men, the megacorp in Isaac Asimov’s 1950 sci-fi classic I, Robot.
Soylent
A brand of plant-based meal replacement drinks and bars, Soylent is named for the human-based wafers in the 1973 dystopian thriller Soylent Green.
Palantir
The all-seeing, $400 billion (market cap) data mining giant got its name from The Lord of the Rings’ magical orbs that could be used to see faraway lands—or distort the truth.
In one version of the future, Ferraro says, companies like Galaxy lead the current data center buildout—putting capital into steel and concrete—only to see its biggest customers eventually decide they want to own the infrastructure themselves. That could make Novogratz’s data center business an attractive spin-off or takeover candidate for a Google or Microsoft.
At the same time, the crypto side of Galaxy’s business, where Novogratz is clearly more engaged, is eagerly awaiting passage of a market structure bill in Congress, which would offer institutions a green light to engage in crypto without fear of regulatory uncertainty. Competition is coming regardless. Even JPMorgan, whose CEO, Jamie Dimon, has long been skeptical of bitcoin, is reportedly considering offering crypto trading to its institutional clients.
In Novogratz’s view, crypto is in the middle of a necessary transition—from a narrative business driven by idealism, leverage and speculation to a utility that provides financial markets’ plumbing.
“If in three years you can’t buy your Taylor Swift ticket—not just with crypto, but through a decentralized exchange, and it’s programmable— we will have failed as an industry,” Novogratz says. “If it’s just bitcoin and gambling, I’m gonna feel like I wasted the last ten years of my life, even if I made a lot of money.”
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