Zcash mining company Fortitude has activated a 12-megawatt data center in Grand Island, Nebraska, marking the completion of its first greenfield site and pushing its total owned power portfolio beyond 60 megawatts across seven locations.
First Greenfield Site Goes Live
Announced Tuesday, the Digital Currency Group-owned operator confirmed the Grand Island facility has cleared construction and electrical testing and is ready for commercial operations. The milestone arrives ahead of Fortitude’s planned public listing through a previously disclosed business combination with medical technology company HeartSciences, which trades on Nasdaq under the ticker HSCS.
CEO Andrea Childs said: ‘Our power strategy is owned-and-operated, and that discipline is what underpins our vertically integrated Zcash strategy and our venture mining platform. 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.’
Projected Cost Reductions
Fortitude expects the Nebraska site to cut its direct cash cost of mining Zcash from roughly $70 per coin down to approximately $40 per coin, contingent on stable power, network, and market conditions. The company attributes the projected savings to lower-cost owned electricity and next-generation mining hardware.
The facility is contracted to purchase power at around $0.045 per kilowatt-hour. It sits between two solar generation facilities and adjacent to a substation carrying excess capacity, enabling it to function as an interruptible load that can shed consumption during peak demand periods. Zcash currently trades near $460 per coin at a market capitalisation of approximately $8 billion.
Background and Strategy
Launched in January 2025, Fortitude spun out of Digital Currency Group’s mining division at Foundry to pursue a venture mining strategy focused on proof-of-work cryptocurrencies including Bitcoin. The company’s stated model reinvests mining profits into new equipment and site acquisitions.
Childs positioned Zcash as an opportunity distinct from Bitcoin, arguing that Bitcoin’s mining economics are ‘mature and crowded’ compared with Zcash, and that Fortitude’s vertically integrated structure and mining history leave it well placed to benefit if Zcash grows in importance.
Power Competition Context
Crypto miners are facing intensifying competition for affordable electricity as AI data centre operators absorb capacity across the United States. Grand Island city officials noted Fortitude’s facility was designed to operate as a flexible grid resource while limiting its footprint 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.’
