- Soluna Holdings and Applied Digital are jointly building a 50-megawatt AI and HPC data center in Texas, next to Soluna’s existing wind farm
- Applied Digital will own 51 percent of the new project and contribute cash, while Soluna owns 49 percent and contributes a ground sublease on the site
- A tenant tied to Applied Digital has already signed a non-binding letter of intent to lease the facility once it is built
Bitcoin mining companies spent years building out large-scale power infrastructure and grid connections specifically to run energy-intensive mining hardware around the clock. That same infrastructure, it turns out, is just as useful for a very different kind of energy-hungry computing: training and running artificial intelligence models. A growing number of miners are now leasing or jointly developing that infrastructure for AI companies instead of, or alongside, continuing to mine bitcoin with it themselves.
Soluna Holdings’ joint venture with Applied Digital Corp, disclosed in an SEC filing, is a clear recent example of this shift. The two companies are jointly building a 50-megawatt AI and high-performance computing data center called Project Dorothy 3 in Briscoe County, Texas, positioned directly next to Soluna’s existing 150-megawatt Briscoe Wind Farm, giving the new facility immediate access to power infrastructure Soluna had already built out for its own operations.
The ownership structure of the new venture illustrates how a traditional bitcoin miner can participate in this shift without necessarily running the AI-facing business itself. Applied Digital will hold 51 percent ownership of the new project company and contribute roughly $19.5 million in cash, while Soluna holds the remaining 49 percent and contributes a ground sublease for the site, valued at $18.75 million, rather than cash. That split lets Soluna monetize land and power access it already controlled, without needing to independently raise the full capital required to build and operate an AI data center from scratch on its own.
A company called ChronoScale Holdings, majority-owned by Applied Digital, has already signed a non-binding letter of intent to lease the completed facility, giving the joint venture a likely tenant lined up even before construction finishes, though the binding details of that lease remain to be finalized. Soluna Chief Executive Officer John Belizaire framed the broader logic behind the shift plainly, arguing that the real constraint limiting artificial intelligence’s growth is energy access rather than chip availability, a view that implicitly positions bitcoin miners, who already control substantial power infrastructure, as unusually well positioned to help address that bottleneck.
This pattern extends well beyond a single deal: bitcoin miners across the industry have increasingly explored converting some or all of their existing power infrastructure toward AI and high-performance computing hosting, driven by the fact that AI compute demand has outpaced available power capacity in many markets, while mining profitability has become more volatile and competitive as network difficulty has risen. The announcement, filed with the SEC, set a target closing date of December 1, 2026 for the new joint venture.
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