Stak Energy proposes 715-acre North Slope lease for Bitcoin mining

Stak Energy’s bid for a 50-year lease on 715 acres of North Slope tundra is drawing scrutiny because the state would hand over a large block of land without requiring deadlines, milestones or a firm promise that the project will ever be built. For residents of the borough, the question is not whether the project sounds ambitious, but what control the public gives up, what precedent it sets for future leases and whether scarce land and infrastructure should be reserved for something with clearer long-term value.

The Alaska Department of Natural Resources issued a preliminary decision to lease the property after no competing bids were submitted. Public comment runs through June 15, 2026. Stak’s proposal has since grown from a smaller Bitcoin-mining plan into a $500 million data-center project of about one square mile, roughly 25 miles south of major North Slope infrastructure. State documents say the project could use more than twice as much natural gas as urban Alaska consumes for electricity and residential and commercial heating.

That scale is driving the debate. Supporters of the broader data-center push have cast such projects as one way to make a future gas pipeline from the North Slope to population centers more economic. Gov. Mike Dunleavy has argued that North Slope data centers could help strengthen the case for a multibillion-dollar pipeline. But the North Slope still does not have that line, and the lease proposal offers no guarantee that the infrastructure residents have heard about for years will follow.

The company has also not disclosed who would finance the project, though it had previously said it was raising money from Anchorage firm McKinley Alaska Private Investment. Stak has added political heft as it has grown, hiring former state natural resources commissioner John Boyle and former state special assistant Jim Shine. Founder and CEO Sparrow Mahoney grew up in Alaska and attended Wasilla High School.

The lease proposal arrives as the state keeps pressing ahead on North Slope energy development. In November 2025, the annual North Slope oil and gas lease sale brought in $16.97 million in high bids for 271 tracts, the most tracts sold since the areawide program began in 1999. The figures show continued interest in the region, but they also underline how much is at stake in each land-use decision.

The project’s critics see the lease as window dressing unless Stak can show a pipeline, power supply and financing that match the scale of the claim. That concern lands hard in a region where the North Slope Borough, Arctic Slope Regional Corp., the Iñupiat Community of the Arctic Slope and Ilisagvik College all sit inside broader fights over land use, subsistence, and who gets to shape the region’s next economy. A separate pilot at Hilcorp’s Endicott oil field, planned to run continuously for four years, was framed last year as a test of whether natural-gas-fired power could support Bitcoin mining and other data-center uses on the Arctic North Slope. Stak’s lease now raises the stakes from a test case to a far larger land decision.