Cryptocurrency miner Canaan Inc. and renewable-powered data center developer Soluna Holdings have come to an agreement on connecting Bitcoin mining to co-located wind power in Texas.
Soluna and Canaan have announced a strategic hosting agreement which would deploy about 20 MW of Bitcoin mining technology alongside Soluna’s Project Dorothy in Briscoe County. The Avalon A15 XP mining technology and miners would be deployed early next year, according to the release.
Project Dorothy is a planned 100-MW data center site, 50 MW of which is already in operation, located alongside a wind energy farm.
“Soluna is thrilled to develop this new partnership with an industry leader like Canaan,” said John Belizaire, CEO of Soluna, in a statement. “This agreement reflects our shared commitment to delivering high-performance computing solutions powered by renewable energy. With Project Dorothy 2 now online and operational, we’re doubling down on our mission to make renewable energy a global superpower.”
True to Soluna’s history of naming projects after leading female computer scientists, Project Dorothy is in honor of Dorothy Vaughn, an African American woman who led teams in NASA and the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. She was played by Octavia Spencer in the 2016 film “Hidden Figures.”
Soluna’s other renewable-powered data center developments include Project Sophie in Kentucky, named for British computer scientist Sophie Wilson, who helped design advanced instruction set architecture for computer processors. Another Soluna site is Project Fei built near a 240-MW solar farm in Texas, which is named for pioneering artificial intelligence (AI) researcher Fei-Fei Li.
Soluna recently surpassed 1 GW in renewable energy and data center co-location project development.
Bitcoin is a digital, decentralized cryptocurrency technology invented in 2008 and growing exponentially since then to market value estimated at more than $1 trillion in 2024. The global energy intensity of Bitcoin mining, in which proof of work requires collaboration of many computers, consumes close to 165 Terawatt hours of electricity annually, according to various reports.
The electricity demand of cloud-based data center and AI computing could double to 945 TWh by 2030, according to the International Energy Agency. That consumption is more than any one nation other than China, the U.S., Japan, Russia and India.
