Soluna Holdings, the parent company of Soluna Computing, has secured $35 million in project financing to develop green data centres co-located with renewable energy assets.
Spring Lane Capital, a private equity firm, has invested private funds in Soluna as a part of their strategy focused on hybrid project capital for sustainability solutions in the energy, food, water, waste, and transportation industries. The capital will help develop three behind-the-meter (BTM) projects designed to convert wasted renewable energy into clean computing services such as bitcoin mining and artificial intelligence.
“Soluna is the only true green bitcoin company we have yet seen,” said Rob Day, Spring Lane Capital Partner and Co-Founder. “Going after wasted renewable energy – ‘spilled power’ – is a compelling solution – and fixes both bitcoin’s climate problem and wind power’s grid problem.”
Michael Toporek, CEO of Soluna Holdings, Inc. said: “Consistent with our previously articulated strategy, we continue to pursue opportunities that we believe enable us to optimise our cost of capital. The Spring Lane Capital approach helps us develop a mature repeatable model that can be scaled.”
The first of the three projects, Dorothy, named in honour of African American mathematician and human-computer Dorothy Vaughan, is expected to be energised later this summer and coincide with the launch of a local STEM program. The Dorothy project is a 100 MW data centre with a 50 MW initial phase, connected to a Texas wind farm that produces more electricity than the grid can consume.
The other two projects funded by the new capital will come from Soluna’s robust pipeline.
John Belizaire, CEO of Soluna Computing, said: “We are honoured to have a pioneering sustainability project finance firm like Spring Lane Capital back our vision. Our model of leveraging excess clean energy to generate low-cost computing is the future of green bitcoin mining and green data centres.”
At power plants like the wind farm where the Dorothy project is under construction, excess energy is wasted when the grid becomes overloaded or demand is too low. Soluna’s scalable solution allows every excess megawatt to be used for batch-oriented, computing-intensive processes, such as cryptocurrency mining and machine learning. Additionally, flexible demand consumers help stabilise the grid by preventing power overload, which can otherwise lead to blackouts and grid malfunction.
Last month, Soluna Holdings sold its Albany-based MTI Instruments subsidiary for $10.75 million, expanding its focus on helping the modern grid absorb more renewable energy through flexible green data centres.
