CONNECT WITH US
Climate & Energy

Climate & Energy

‘Every solar plant can be a data center’

pv magazine Global logo

Published on

Add as a preferred source on Google
‘Every solar plant can be a data center’

Rune Energy closed a $40 million seed funding round recently to build modular, plug-in data centers for solar farms. Can you tell us about where the idea to turn solar farms into data centers originated?

Before we started Rune, I was working at SoftBank Energy and I had the realization that solar produces direct current (DC), compute runs on DC, but nothing connects them today. That’s a big enough problem to start a company to solve it. The sun is our most abundant energy resource but it’s the one we are the worst at using and I want to build products that allow us to use that to power high value activities. At the moment, I think the highest value activity is AI.

We started back in 2023, and we started with other kinds of compute, specifically Bitcoin mining, just like CoreWeave and Crusoe, which are some of the larger traditional bitcoin mining players. We have deployed on that kind of compute in Chile’s Atacama Desert which is one of the best solar resources in the world. We’ve also deployed in the United States and in Europe, in Denmark and Sweden. Right now, we’re focused on growing in the US though and we have switched focus to exclusively AI compute. The bitcoin mining was more of a bridge, so to speak. In terms of total contracted power, we’re at 80 MW, targeting 100 MW of AI data centers in the next 12 months.

Rune Energy says its model offers a six times cheaper balance of plant per megawatt compared to conventional data center providers.


Source link
Related Topics:Climate & Energy

Disclaimer

We strive to uphold the highest ethical standards in all of our reporting and coverage. We TheMorningPulse.fyi want to be transparent with our readers about any potential conflicts of interest that may arise in our work. It's possible that some of the investors we feature may have connections to other businesses, including competitors or companies we write about. However, we want to assure our readers that this will not have any impact on the integrity or impartiality of our reporting. We are committed to delivering accurate, unbiased news and information to our audience, and we will continue to uphold our ethics and principles in all of our work. Thank you for your trust and support.