Dallas-based data center developer and operator Skybox is building an expansive data center campus in West Texas called the Hodl Ranch, designed specifically for cryptocurrency mining and HPC workloads.

HODL, originally a meme, is the crypto community slang for holding onto cryptocurrencies long-term, believing that the price will go up, rather than selling them for immediate gain.

The 174-acre site will be powered by 100 percent renewable energy, through a newly built substation.

According to the website, the first phase of the project, with 110MVA of power, is expected to go live in March.

Don’t stop believing

The Hodl Ranch hopes to take advantage of low renewable electricity prices in Texas, quoting estimates as low as $0.024 per kilowatt-hour.

According to the website, the campus will be able to support not just cryptocurrency mining equipment, but all manners of dense, power-hungry hardware, like rendering farms and GPU clusters used for artificial intelligence research.

Skybox says the location benefits from 100Gbps connectivity, low corporate tax rate and an arid environment that “allows for hundreds of megawatts of low cost evaporative cooling.”

The company plans to expand the location with another three phases, and is planning to build more substations, delivering 300+ MVA of power capacity.

But it’s not clear whether the Hodl Ranch will actually get to serve its original purpose: cryptocurrency markets are experiencing what the community calls the “crypto winter,” with the price of Bitcoin tracking around $3,788 – a far cry from an all-time high of $19,891 in February 2017.

We have contacted Skybox for additional information, and will update this story if we find out more.