Texas Tech’s football stadium will be renamed Galaxy Stadium starting with the 2026 season under a 15-year naming-rights agreement announced Friday by Galaxy Digital. The venue is currently known as Jones AT&T Stadium.
Galaxy, listed on Nasdaq under the ticker GLXY, described itself as a trading, asset-management, and data-center company.
The announcement lands at a strong point for Texas Tech Athletics. The Red Raiders recently won the Big 12 and reached the College Football Playoff. The team is scheduled to begin the Galaxy Stadium era on Sept. 5 against Abilene Christian.
Deal value tops $70 million
The agreement is worth more than $70 million. Along with the stadium naming rights, Galaxy becomes the official data center and digital assets partner of Texas Tech Athletics.
The partnership includes branding across football, men’s basketball, and women’s basketball. It also includes NIL opportunities for student-athletes through what the announcement called “branded activation campaigns and original content.”
“We’re pleased to welcome Galaxy as the new naming rights partner of our football stadium,” athletics director Kirby Hocutt said in a statement. “This long-term partnership with Galaxy will have a lasting impact on Texas Tech Athletics.”
Helios campus sits at the center of Galaxy’s pitch
Galaxy CEO Mike Novogratz tied the agreement to the company’s nearby Helios project in Dickens County. “At our Helios campus in nearby Dickens County, we're building the infrastructure that powers the code economy,” he said.
Galaxy is investing billions of dollars into the Helios data-center campus in Dickens County, which has 1.6 gigawatts of approved capacity for high-performance computing. Novogratz said the site is “the infrastructure that powers the code economy” and said the company plans to hire locally and “be a good neighbor.”
Why a crypto firm wants stadium naming rights
The report framed the rationale in simple terms: visibility and credibility. Naming rights can deliver both.
It pointed to Crypto.com’s involvement with the F1 Miami Grand Prix as one example. It also noted FTX’s arena naming deal with an NBA team, signed shortly before the company collapsed. That history serves as a reminder that a 15-year agreement with a crypto company also carries a 15-year risk window.
Galaxy’s shift toward AI and HPC infrastructure
Galaxy itself has gone through a volatile stretch. Its shares fell after the company posted a quarterly loss of $482 million. Since then, it has leaned away from pure crypto trading and more heavily toward AI and high-performance computing data centers, a business that is described as steadier and far more power-intensive.
That business shift helps explain the strategy behind the Texas Tech deal. Bitcoin miners and crypto-native firms are becoming unexpected landlords in the AI buildout. Bernstein described them as “unlikely power brokers” in the race for infrastructure. The report also said Galaxy’s Helios expansion is among the largest projects of its kind in North America.
At the same time, gigawatt-scale data centers in drought-prone West Texas are facing criticism over water use and stress on the power grid. Galaxy’s “closed-loop” water system is likely to face that same scrutiny.