Fortitude, the Digital Currency Group (DCG)-owned miner, has flipped the switch on its first greenfield data center — a 12-megawatt Zcash mining site in Grand Island, Nebraska — advancing a push to control its own power and cut mining costs as it prepares to go public.
The newly completed facility, Fortitude’s first built from scratch rather than leased, has finished construction and electrical testing and is now ready for commercial operations. It boosts the company’s owned power portfolio to more than 60 megawatts spread across seven sites, and comes as Fortitude pursues a planned public listing via a previously announced business combination with HeartSciences (Nasdaq: HSCS).
Why this matters
- Cost punch: Fortitude projects the Grand Island site will lower its direct cash cost to mine Zcash from about $70 per coin to roughly $40 per coin, assuming successful deployment of new miners and stable power, network and market conditions. With Zcash trading around $489 per coin at the time of the announcement, that gap would materially widen potential operating margins.
- Cheaper electricity: The site will buy power at about $0.045 per kWh and is sited between two solar generation facilities and adjacent to a substation with excess capacity. That location lets the operation act as an interruptible load — scaling back consumption during grid stress — and tap lower-cost, locally available generation.
- Hardware and integration: Fortitude attributes much of the expected savings to next-generation, more efficient mining hardware combined with its owned-and-operated power strategy.
CEO Andrea Childs framed the move as strategic vertical integration: “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.” She also emphasized Fortitude’s focus on Zcash, saying the asset’s mining economics are less mature and less crowded than Bitcoin’s and that Fortitude’s vertically integrated model positions it to benefit from Zcash’s growth.
A new entrant with legacy roots
Launched in January 2025 out of DCG’s Foundry mining division, Fortitude follows a “venture mining” playbook: mine proof-of-work coins (including Bitcoin and Zcash), then reinvest profits into more equipment and new sites to expand its footprint. The Grand Island project is an early example of that strategy in action.
Broader backdrop
The announcement comes as miners nationwide scramble for low-cost power amid rising competition from AI data centers and greater scrutiny of data-center electricity and water consumption. Grand Island officials say Fortitude designed the facility to operate as a flexible grid resource and to limit community impact. Childs added: “Competition for power has intensified, but in our view, it hasn't slowed us down. 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.”
Bottom line: Fortitude’s new Nebraska facility is a concrete step in its push to pair owned, low-cost power with efficient hardware — lowering Zcash mining costs and strengthening the company’s argument as it moves toward a public listing.
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