Fortitude Powers Up 12MW Nebraska Mining Facility to Slash Zcash Production Costs
The greenfield data center pushes the firm’s owned capacity past 60MW while lowering unit economics ahead of a public listing.
Cryptocurrency infrastructure firm Fortitude has brought its first custom-built 12-megawatt data center online in Grand Island, Nebraska, pushing its operating capacity past 60 megawatts across seven facility locations.
The deployment marks a strategic turn toward asset ownership at a time when competition for electrical grid access is accelerating across North America. Operating on a power rate of approximately $0.045 per kilowatt-hour alongside updated hardware, Fortitude expects its direct cash cost to mine Zcash to fall from around $70 per token to $40, provided power pricing and network difficulty remain steady. Zcash is currently trading around $489 per coin with an overall market capitalization near $8 billion.
Positioned between two solar power plants and situated adjacent to a utility substation with available capacity, the site operates as an interruptible power load. This configuration enables the facility to reduce energy draw during peak demand windows, assisting local utility management while keeping baseline operational expenses low. Municipal representatives in Grand Island noted that the site was designed to function as a flexible grid user while limiting community impact.
Industrial power allocation has tightened globally as hyperscale artificial intelligence data centers compete with digital asset miners for available megawatts. In response, Fortitude Chief Executive Officer Andrea Childs emphasized that direct ownership of energy infrastructure provides greater operational agility than third-party hosting contracts, where lease terms and counterparty incentives can conflict with long-term mining efficiency.
Fortitude was launched in January 2025 out of the mining arm at Digital Currency Group‘s Foundry division. The company follows a venture mining framework, channeling operational returns back into facility development and hardware procurement. While much of the industrial mining sector remains concentrated on Bitcoin, Fortitude has focused on Zcash, pointing to less congested network economics compared to the heavily saturated Bitcoin sector.
The operational turn-on and completion of electrical testing in Nebraska comes ahead of Fortitude’s scheduled public listing via a reverse merger with HeartSciences (Nasdaq: HSCS), a publicly traded medical technology company.
