Fortitude Powers Up 12 MW Nebraska Mine as It Prepares for Public Listing
Fortitude, the Zcash-focused mining arm spun out of Digital Currency Group, has brought a 12-megawatt greenfield facility online in Grand Island, Nebraska — its first purpose-built data center and a step that raises its owned power footprint to more than 60 MW across seven sites. The company said construction and electrical testing are complete and the site is ready for commercial operations.
The move comes as Fortitude prepares to list publicly through a previously announced business combination with HeartSciences (Nasdaq: HSCS). CEO Andrea Childs said the company’s “owned-and-operated” power strategy underpins a vertically integrated approach to Zcash mining and a broader 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,” she told Decrypt.
Cost and technical details
- Fortitude expects the Grand Island site to cut its direct cash cost to mine a Zcash coin from roughly $70 to about $40, assuming successful deployment of next-generation mining hardware and stable power, network and market conditions. By comparison, the article notes Zcash trading near $489 per coin with an $8 billion market cap.
- The site will buy electricity at about $0.045 per kilowatt-hour. Its location — between two solar generation facilities and adjacent to a substation with excess capacity — allows the operation to run as an interruptible load, scaling back consumption during peak demand to support grid stability.
- The company attributes projected savings to lower-cost owned power and more efficient mining equipment.
Strategy and market context
Launched in January 2025 out of DCG’s Foundry mining division, Fortitude pursues what it calls a venture-mining model: reinvesting mining profits into new rigs and site acquisitions to rapidly expand infrastructure. Childs argued Zcash presents different, earlier-stage mining economics than Bitcoin — which she described as mature and crowded — and said Fortitude’s vertical structure and long-term conviction position it to benefit from Zcash’s growth.
The project arrives amid intensifying competition for low-cost power, as both crypto miners and new AI data centers chase suitable sites and cheap electricity. With data centers under greater scrutiny for electricity and water use, Grand Island officials said the Fortitude facility was designed to function as a flexible grid resource while minimizing community impact.
“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.”
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