In brief
- Fortitude brought a 12-megawatt mining facility in Grand Island, Nebraska, online, increasing its owned power portfolio to more than 60 MW.
- The company expects the site to reduce its direct cash cost of mining Zcash through lower electricity costs and newer mining equipment.
- The announcement follows Fortitude's planned merger with HeartSciences, which would take the company public.
Zcash mining company Fortitude has brought a 12-megawatt facility in Grand Island, Nebraska, online, completing its first greenfield data center and expanding its owned power portfolio to more than 60 megawatts across seven sites.
Announced Tuesday, the Digital Currency Group-owned company said its first greenfield facility has completed construction and electrical testing and is ready for commercial operations. The milestone comes ahead of Fortitude's planned public listing through its previously announced business combination with HeartSciences (Nasdaq: HSCS), a publicly traded medical technology company.
"Our power strategy is owned-and-operated, and that discipline is what underpins our vertically integrated Zcash strategy and our venture mining platform," CEO Andrea Childs told Decrypt. "Owning the asset rather than leasing capacity from someone whose incentives run opposite to ours is intended to give us a degree of flexibility that we believe few operators have."
Fortitude said the facility is expected to reduce its direct cash cost of mining Zcash from about $70 per coin to roughly $40 per coin, assuming successful deployment of mining equipment and stable power, network and market conditions. For reference, Zcash currently trades for $489 per coin at an $8 billion market capitalization.
The company said the projected savings stem from lower-cost owned power and more efficient next-generation mining hardware.
The facility is expected to purchase electricity for about $0.045 per kilowatt-hour. It is located between two solar generation facilities and next to a substation with excess capacity, allowing it to operate as an interruptible load that can reduce electricity consumption during periods of peak demand.
Launched in January 2025, Fortitude emerged from Digital Currency Group's mining division at Foundry to mine Bitcoin and other proof-of-work cryptocurrencies through what it calls a venture mining strategy. The company said it would reinvest mining profits into new equipment and site acquisitions as it expanded its infrastructure footprint.
"In our view, Zcash today is at a completely different stage than Bitcoin. Our perspective is that Bitcoin's mining economics are mature and crowded when compared to Zcash," Childs added. "We believe Zcash’s time is now, and our vertically integrated structure, coupled with our long-term conviction and history mining the asset, has positioned us to benefit from Zcash’s continued growth and importance in the future of the financial system."
The project comes as cryptocurrency miners race to secure low-cost power, with growing demand from AI data centers increasing competition for electricity and suitable sites.
With data centers facing increasing scrutiny over their electricity and water demands, Grand Island officials said Fortitude's mining facility was designed to operate as a flexible grid resource while limiting its impact on the surrounding community.
"Competition for power has intensified, but in our view, it hasn't slowed us down," Childs said. "By developing and owning our own sites, we seek to control our power costs directly rather than relying on third-party vendors to set them for us."