Galaxy Digital Bets $75 Million on Texas Tech as Its Stock Slides

Mike Novogratz’s Galaxy Digital signed a 15-year deal to put its name on Texas Tech’s football stadium, and shares in his company fell more than 3% the same afternoon the news broke. The crypto and AI infrastructure firm will rebrand the Red Raiders’ home as Galaxy Stadium starting with the 2026 season opener on September 5, replacing a name that has topped the building for nearly eight decades.

The agreement lands as Galaxy’s stock trades far below where it stood a year ago, and as a previous crypto company’s stadium bet in Miami still serves as a cautionary footnote in sports business circles. Novogratz wants Texas Tech’s fans, its graduates and its West Texas land to become part of Galaxy’s long-term infrastructure, whatever crypto prices do between now and the deal’s final year.

Galaxy Buys Fifteen Years on the Lubbock Skyline

Under the agreement, announced Friday in a joint statement confirming the September 5 kickoff, Galaxy becomes the official data center and digital assets partner of Texas Tech Athletics. Neither side disclosed a dollar figure. Sports Business Journal put the value at about $75 million over the full term, citing athletic director Kirby Hocutt. Yahoo Sports’ Ross Dellenger reported a lower number, just over $70 million, or roughly $4.7 million a year.

“We’re pleased to welcome Galaxy as the new naming rights partner of our football stadium,” Hocutt said in the announcement. Texas Tech Athletics Partners, the school’s local Learfield sponsorship arm, brokered the deal.

The stadium has carried the name of Clifford B. Jones, Texas Tech’s third president, since it opened in 1947 on the strength of his $100,000 gift. It became Jones SBC Stadium in 2000 and Jones AT&T Stadium in 2006. AT&T’s naming agreement expired in June, clearing the way for Galaxy.

Whichever dollar figure holds up, it puts Texas Tech ahead of several recent conference peers.

Sports Business Journal also reported that Galaxy’s logo is expected to appear at midfield, though neither company has confirmed that detail publicly.

What Red Raider Athletes Actually Get

Beyond the stadium sign, Galaxy’s branding extends across Red Raider football and both basketball programs through digital, social and in-game placements. The deal also opens NIL, meaning name, image and likeness, opportunities for Texas Tech athletes through branded activation campaigns and original content.

“This collaboration with Galaxy encompasses more than just naming rights,” said Andrew Wheeler, Executive Vice President of Sports Properties at Learfield. He described it as a partnership built around student-athlete storytelling, fan experience and campus-wide impact.

Texas Tech also framed the deal as a talent pipeline into Galaxy’s own business. The company’s release noted that Texas Tech graduates already work at Helios, its data center campus, and said that pipeline would grow as Galaxy’s Texas footprint expands. Both sides flagged a broader relationship ahead, including joint exploration of academic and commercial AI projects, workforce development and economic investment across West Texas.

The Stock Drops the Same Day the Deal Closes

Galaxy shares traded around $21.50 Friday, down more than 3% as the Texas Tech news spread, according to TradingView data. That caps a rough stretch for a stock that has fallen roughly 35% over the past six months, per Investing.com figures, even as the broader market climbed.

The timing is not flattering. In October, Galaxy and its executives, including Novogratz himself, sold stock as part of a $460 million share sale priced at $36 apiece. Shares have not traded that high since.

Decrypt reported that Galaxy shares had already been sliding after a $482 million quarterly loss earlier this year, part of a broader pivot away from pure crypto trading toward capital-heavy AI infrastructure. The company’s fourth-quarter 2025 results showed a net loss of $241 million even as it kept building out its data center business. A similar dynamic is playing out across the wider AI buildout, where fresh funding like a $20 million raise backed by KBR’s energy AI bet shows how much outside capital is chasing the same power-hungry infrastructure Galaxy is building in Texas.

Wall Street has not abandoned the stock. Compass Point trimmed its price target to $40 from $41 after Novogratz made premature comments about a high-performance computing deal, but kept its Buy rating, according to a valuation reset note flagging the stock’s fully retraced 32% rally. The firm said Galaxy’s second-quarter earnings, due July 28, and an August 31 grid-capacity decision at its McGregor site could both move shares later this summer.

Four figures capture Friday’s disconnect between the marketing win and the market reaction.

• $75 million is Sports Business Journal’s reported value for the 15-year deal, though Galaxy and Texas Tech have not confirmed a number.
• 3%+ is roughly how far Galaxy shares fell Friday as the news broke.
• $482 million was the size of Galaxy’s most recent quarterly loss, per Decrypt.
• $40 is Compass Point’s price target on the stock, nearly double where shares traded Friday.

Novogratz brushed past the timing entirely. He called Texas Tech exactly the kind of institution Galaxy wants to be aligned with, citing its Big 12 title, its College Football Playoff run and what he called a fan base that shows up with real intensity.

The Last Time Crypto Bought an Arena

Crypto and stadium naming rights have a fraught history. In March 2021, FTX signed a 19-year, $135 million deal to rename what is now the Miami Heat’s arena. FTX Arena opened that June. By January 2023, months after FTX’s bankruptcy and the fraud charges against founder Sam Bankman-Fried, Miami-Dade County terminated the agreement.

The building spent three months as the generic Miami-Dade Arena before Kaseya, a Miami-based software firm, stepped in with a 17-year, $117 million rebrand to Kaseya Center in April 2023.

We were all blindsided by what happened with FTX. It was nobody’s favorite time period.

Eric Woolworth, the Heat’s president of business operations, said that in 2023 as the team scrambled to replace its collapsed naming partner. It remains the reference point hovering over every crypto stadium deal signed since, including Galaxy’s.

Kansas, Monster Energy and a Sponsorship Land Rush

Galaxy is not the only digital asset company chasing a Big 12 logo this month. On July 8, Ripple announced a jersey patch deal putting the XRP logo on Kansas uniforms, the first time a cryptocurrency brand has appeared on a major college athletics program’s jerseys. Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse, a Kansas alumnus and former student body president, has personal ties to the school.

That deal followed the Big 12’s own conference-wide jersey patch agreement with Monster Energy, unveiled a day earlier and reportedly worth about $1 million annually per school. College sports has become a busy marketplace for brands chasing young, loyal audiences at the same time schools are sharing revenue directly with athletes for the first time.

Crypto and AI infrastructure firms are elbowing into pro sports too. AI cloud provider IREN, a former pure-play bitcoin miner, signed a jersey patch deal with the Golden State Warriors last month reportedly worth more than $50 million annually, the largest sponsorship agreement in North American sports.

• Big 12 Conference and Monster Energy – a conference-wide jersey patch deal worth an estimated $1 million per school annually.
• Kansas Jayhawks and Ripple – the first crypto logo on a major program’s uniforms, tied to Garlinghouse’s Kansas roots.
• Golden State Warriors and IREN – a jersey patch reportedly worth more than $50 million a year, the richest sponsorship in North American sports.
• Texas Tech Red Raiders and Galaxy Digital – a 15-year stadium naming deal reported at roughly $75 million.

Each deal pairs a crypto or AI-linked company with a fan base that skews young, at the exact moment digital asset prices are under pressure.

Why Is Novogratz Still Chasing Texas?

Novogratz is chasing Texas Tech’s fans and its West Texas land because Galaxy’s real growth engine sits sixty miles from Lubbock. Helios, the company’s data center campus in Dickens County, started as a Bitcoin mining site and now carries 1.6 gigawatts of approved capacity as it converts to AI and high-performance computing work.

Galaxy leased the initial 800 megawatts of Helios to AI cloud provider CoreWeave, a deal representing more than $7.5 billion in capital investment, and valued the whole campus above $15 billion in its first annual report as a Nasdaq-listed company. Texas grid operator ERCOT approved an additional 830 megawatts for the site in January, more than doubling its total capacity.

“Demand for compute is not a cycle, it is a structural condition that will define the next decade,” Novogratz wrote in that report. It is the same logic behind the football stadium: buy visibility now, in a region where cheap land and power still make long-term bets possible, and let the crypto cycle sort itself out later.

Galaxy’s power hunt is part of a much larger scramble. Governments from France to India are now courting AI data centers as electricity becomes the resource that decides who wins the AI buildout, and Texas remains one of the few places still offering both land and grid capacity at scale.

Texas Tech opens the Galaxy Stadium era on September 5 against Abilene Christian, somewhere between $70 million and $75 million and fifteen years into a bet built to outlast several more crypto cycles. Novogratz marked the news on X, joking that he had already bought cowboy hats and boots for the occasion.

Whether Red Raider Nation remembers Galaxy the way Miami once remembered FTX, or the way Lubbock remembered Jones, will depend on what Novogratz’s data centers deliver over the next fifteen years.

Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and is not investment advice. Crypto and equity markets are volatile, and figures are accurate as of publication on July 18, 2026.