Soluna Holdings, a publicly traded Bitcoin mining and AI infrastructure firm focused on renewable energy, disclosed a $53 million deal to acquire the Briscoe Wind Farm in Briscoe County, Texas. The purchase is aimed at powering its upcoming Project Dorothy 3 AI data center campus. The Briscoe facility carries a potential capacity of up to 300 megawatts (MW), and Soluna expects the site to generate annualized revenue in a range of $20 million to $24.4 million. On the news, Soluna’s shares rose about 7.6%, trading near $0.76 per share.

Soluna has been diversifying beyond crypto mining since February 2024, expanding into AI data center infrastructure in the midst of a broader industry pivot toward AI and high-performance computing to shore up revenues as mining profits faced pressure.

Related coverage on the strategic shift and its implications for the crypto mining sector provides additional context for readers following this transition.

Key takeaways

• Soluna commits to a wind-powered expansion with the Briscoe Wind Farm, potentially adding up to 300 MW of capacity to feed its Dorothy 3 AI campus.
• The project is expected to generate $20–$24.4 million in annual revenue, illustrating a shift toward diversified infrastructure revenue streams for crypto-focused operators.
• Industry profitability remains under pressure: CoinShares reports show up to 20% of mining companies aren’t profitable as of early 2026, with miners facing higher energy costs and flattening block rewards.
• Mining economics have deteriorated: the average cost to mine one BTC rose to nearly $80,000 in Q4 2025, while Bitcoin traded well below that level amid a volatile price environment.
• Hashrate growth and balance-sheet strain have driven renewed emphasis on renewables, with several operators adopting wind and solar solutions to reduce exposure to traditional energy markets.

Wind power as a hedge for an evolving sector

The Briscoe Wind Farm purchase aligns with Soluna’s broader strategy of integrating renewable energy with cutting-edge compute capacity. The company’s plan to power Dorothy 3 with wind capacity reflects a longer-term thesis: align infrastructure assets with revenue streams less tied to the cyclical swings of crypto mining. Soluna previously highlighted its foray into AI hosting and co-location services as part of a February 2024 expansion into AI data center infrastructure, signaling a deliberate pivot away from relying solely on volatile mining rewards.

In September, Soluna also announced a collaboration with Canaan, a major mining hardware manufacturer, to deploy a wind-powered BTC mining facility at the Briscoe site. That partnership underscores a dual objective: leveraging renewable energy to improve mining cost structures while integrating AI-focused data center capabilities to diversify cash flows.

The move comes amid a broader industry environment where operators are rethinking energy strategies. The growing emphasis on renewables is partly driven by the need to reduce exposure to asymmetric power costs and by the search for predictable, long-term capacity utilization that AI and HPC workloads can provide.

Industry profitability in the crosshairs

The mining sector continues to grapple with a convergence of challenges. A March 2026 report from asset manager CoinShares notes that a sizable portion of miners are operating at or near breakeven, with as many as 20% of surveyed firms not profitable in that period. The report attributes slipping margins to several factors, including the halving cycle’s aftermath, elevated energy costs, and a tougher price environment for BTC.

The trajectory of Bitcoin prices has also weighed on miners. CoinShares notes that the October 2025 market crash pulled BTC from a peak near $125,000 to around $60,000, a move that compressed margins further as network hashrate continued to climb. The rising hashrate implies more competition for block rewards, intensifying the push for cost-efficient energy and hardware strategies.

In response, several miners have been retreating to renewable energy and smarter energy arrangements. The industry’s energy-cost sensitivity is evident in the fact that miners sold more than 15,000 BTC between October and early March to cover operating expenses, with selling continuing into recent weeks. The pivot to renewables, including partnerships and wind/solar-powered facilities, has become a cornerstone of efforts to sustain operations in a tighter profitability environment.

Renewable deployments are not limited to Soluna’s circle. Other operators—such as The Phoenix Group and Sangha Renewables—have begun integrating renewables to power mining operations, highlighting a broader market trend: energy resilience is increasingly a competitive differentiator for miners facing margin compression.

The momentum around AI-oriented data centers and renewable energy co-location has also fed into broader industry discussions about how Bitcoin mining can coexist with high-demand compute workloads. A related piece of coverage has explored whether AI buildouts could crowd out or compete with mining for energy resources, a dynamic that investors are watching closely as the sector evolves.

What changes, and what remains uncertain

Soluna’s strategic bet on a wind-powered, high-capacity data center campus signals an ongoing effort to diversify revenue beyond commodity mining rewards. The Briscoe deal illustrates how renewable energy assets can bolster a capital-intensive plan to scale AI infrastructure while mitigating the sensitivity of traditional mining to price swings.

Yet the path forward is not without risk. The profitability gap for miners, volatile BTC pricing, and ongoing energy price dynamics remain central uncertainties. The success of Dorothy 3 will hinge on the pace of AI compute adoption, the cost of wind-energy integration, and the ability to sustain utilization at scale. Investors will also be watching how revenue from AI-focused data center operations compares to, and complements, traditional mining earnings over time.

As the sector navigates a period of transition, market participants will likely scrutinize the economics of similar renewable-energy collaborations, the pace of AI demand growth, and the regulatory environment shaping both mining and data-center development.

Readers should monitor Soluna’s project updates, energy grid considerations in Texas, and how the company’s revenue projections progress against actual performance once the facility becomes operational. The evolving balance between AI infrastructure and mining economics will help determine whether renewables can reliably stabilize cash flows for crypto-native operators moving forward.

For context, Soluna’s objectives and the broader industry dynamics continue to be discussed in tandem with coverage on AI-hosting momentum and its potential impact on Bitcoin mining, underscoring a pivotal moment for the sector’s energy strategies and growth trajectories.

Source context: Soluna’s deal details and the Briscoe Wind Farm capacity were reported by Cointelegraph, while CoinShares provided analysis on mining profitability, energy costs, and hashrate dynamics. Market price references for Soluna shares come from Yahoo Finance, reflecting intraday movement around the announcement.

The x402 protocol, Coinbase’s open standard for embedding stablecoin payments directly into web interactions, has officially moved to the Linux Foundation as the newly launched x402 Foundation opens its doors with a broad coalition of industry heavyweights.

The announcement, made Thursday at the MCP Dev Summit North America, marks the protocol’s transition from a Coinbase-led project to a vendor-neutral, community-governed standard designed to accelerate adoption as AI agents increasingly need to pay for services autonomously.

The foundation’s initial governing body includes Cloudflare and Stripe, and founding members include Adyen, Amazon Web Services, American Express, Ampersend.ai, Ant International, Base, Circle, Fiserv Merchant Solutions, Google, KakaoPay, Mastercard, Merit Systems, Microsoft, Polygon Labs, PPRO, Sierra, Shopify, Solana Foundation, Thirdweb and Visa.

From HTTP Error Code to Payment Layer

The x402 protocol revives HTTP’s long-dormant “402 Payment Required” status code, turning it into a functional payment handshake. When an AI agent requests a paid resource, the server responds with a 402 status containing machine-readable price and settlement details. The client signs a payment payload and retries the request, and a facilitator verifies and settles the transaction on-chain.

The design supports both fiat and crypto payment methods across multiple blockchains.

The launch comes as the race to build the internet’s AI payment layer intensifies. x402 faces competition from the Machine Payments Protocol, developed by Stripe and Paradigm’s Tempo blockchain, which uses session-based authentication rather than x402’s per-request model.

Google has already integrated x402 into its Agentic Payments Protocol as the default stablecoin rail. The surrounding infrastructure is also expanding: MoonPay last week released the Open Wallet Standard for AI agent wallet interactions, Visa launched its CLI payment tool targeting agent commerce, and Circle built its Nanopayments directly on x402 for sub-cent USDC transactions.

Coinbase and Cloudflare first announced their intent to create the foundation in September 2025. By placing the protocol under the Linux Foundation’s governance, x402 aims to function as an AI commerce equivalent to SSL, the encryption standard that has become foundational to secure web browsing.

This article was written with the assistance of AI workflows. All our stories are curated, edited and fact-checked by a human.

Bitcoin’s (BTC) range-bound trading within the $60,000 to $73,000 range is impressive, especially when considering the macroeconomic backdrop of Brent crude oil rising to levels not seen since 2008, a hot war between the US, Israel and Iran, and a volatile stock market where the S&P 500 index trades at a 3.95% year-to-date loss. 

Despite these intensifying headwinds, Bitcoin buyers have shown a steady appetite for buying the price drops to $60,000, and while the level currently holds as support, the risk of lower prices is not zero.   

Bitcoin’s 1-day chart shows a bearish continuation pattern, with one pattern confirmed on Jan. 20 as BTC price entered a correction to $60,014, and a second bear flag currently in play. Every price rally to the flag’s overhead trendline has been rebuffed since Feb. 8, and technical analysis stresses the importance of a rally and multi-day candle close above $76,000 to negate the pattern. 

Ideally, a rally to $76,000 would hold through a 2- to 3-day consecutive-candle close, followed by a retest of the trendline at $75,000 to confirm a support-resistance flip, where a former resistance level is now confirmed as support. 

Analysis by chartered market technician Aksel Kibar predicts a potential price drop to $52,500. Referencing analysis from March 18, Kibar said that a,

“Breakdown of the lower boundary will be the signal for a possible move toward $52,500.”

Related: Bitcoin traders forecast short-term downside even as BTC price chases $68K

Data from Velo highlights the relatively flat market demand across Bitcoin’s spot and futures markets. Although traders appear to view instances where BTC’s funding rate turns negative as a buying opportunity, their confidence is largely absent during rallies into the bear flag’s trendline resistance.

Evidence of this is seen in Bitcoin’s aggregated open interest remaining pinned below $20 billion, a level not seen since Feb. 2 when BTC traded near $79,000.

Regarding Kibar’s $52,500 price prediction and its alignment with Bitcoin’s futures markets, Hyblock liquidation heatmap data shows a large number of leveraged long positions at risk of liquidation if BTC falls into the $63,000 to $65,000 range.

Below this is a liquidity gap, and the next block of open margin long positions starts in the $57,500 to $56,000 range.

The current price action essentially reflects a market that trades sideways and consolidates as traders search for capital flow or narrative-related factors that would push them into larger directional bets.

Until such a catalyst emerges, it’s likely that Bitcoin will continue to trade within its $10,000 range, with $60,000 as the lowest key support and $70,000 as the most challenging level of resistance.