A new bitcoin miner has started mining at a 6 megawatts (MW) solar-powered facility in western Colorado, despite the bearish market for crypto.

With its mining operation co-located at a solar farm that has a capacity of 10MW, Aspen Creek Digital Corporation (ACDC) was launched in January of this year. According to a statement shared with CoinDesk, its goal is to start with mining bitcoin at its data center and subsequently offer computing services to other businesses.

Due to co-located with a 75,000-square-foot R&D and fulfillment facility, the Colorado data center will run S19 bitcoin mining machines. The facility will serve as a training hub for ACDC’s future computing infrastructure as well as centralized testing, maintenance and storage.

According to CEO Alexandra DaCosta, ACDC said it was able to raise enough cash ahead of time to secure the required switch gears and transformers for 240MW of capacity. “We wanted to make sure that we had the appropriate infrastructure onhand, to build out our first phase. So for our projects, now we actually have more than enough,” she further told CoinDesk.

Galaxy Digital (GLXY), a crypto-focused financial services firm, was so impressed by the miner’s management team and “power first” approach that it allocated some of Galaxy’s own miners to be hosted at ACDC’s Colorado site.

“The best time to build is a bear market and people shouldn’t be afraid of the market conditions, they just have to make sure that they’re doing it appropriately and effectively,” Amanda Fabiano, Head of Mining at Galaxy told CoinDesk.

Fabiano said many miners started by raising the money first and then try followed by search of operation sites and power sources. However, ACDC did the opposite by figuring out the power and infrastructure first. “She [DaCosta] took the problem of mining and spun it on its head and looked at it from a different perspective, which is really special,” Fabiano added.

ACDC is also developing bitcoin mining sites in Texas, aside from the Colorado data center. Its second facility is a 30MW data center capable of hosting 10,000 ASIC miners co-located behind-the-meter with an 87MW solar farm and is due to be operational this summer. A third project is a 150MW data center, also co-located behind-the-meter, with a 200MW solar farm.

The miner’s operations will be powered by solar energy, but they will still be connected to the grid to have the option to provide power back to the grid. DaCosta said that her company had already successfully completed the procedural requirements for its second site, and is doing the appropriate work for the third site, when asked about the Electric Reliability Council of Texas’s (ERCOT) latest requirement for new large scale miners to seek permission before connecting to the grid.

With the help of its partners who have experience in building renewable energy power infrastructure, ACDC said it was able to figure out the power sources.

The renewable power developers are investors and also part of the miner’s founding team.

In a recent update, Adam Back’s Blockstream and Jack Dorsey’s Block (SQ) said that they are building a pilot crypto mine in Texas which will be powered by a Tesla (TSLA) solar installation and batteries.


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