Soluna Holdings Eyes AI Boom with Behind-the-Meter Data Centers
Soluna Holdings, a company that specializes in renewable energy and hosting services for Bitcoin miners and AI workloads, recently presented its business model at the Water Tower Research Virtual Insights Conference. The company's CEO, John Belizaire, explained how Soluna builds data centers directly at renewable generation sites where excess power is available, addressing a basic inefficiency in the power system.
Belizaire noted that more than 50% of power at some renewable sites never makes it to the grid. By building behind the meter, Soluna can cut interconnection timelines from several years to about 18 months and avoid the need for new transmission lines.
The company currently operates 206 megawatts of Bitcoin mining and hosting capacity and has a development pipeline of 6.3 gigawatts. Soluna is expanding through vertical integration, land purchases, and a new co-mining partnership with Bitdeer Technologies. The company expects AI data center revenue to become about three times larger than current Bitcoin hosting revenue within 18 to 24 months.
Soluna has already started deploying equipment at Project Kati 1, an 83-megawatt wind-powered facility in Texas, and has received its first gross profit from the project. The company is also planning two major AI campuses, with over 300 megawatts of planned capacity, and expects to build at least two more AI data centers in the coming months.