Data center technology startup Rune has launched its RELIC (Renewable Energy Linked Intelligent Compute) system alongside a $40 million Series A funding round to construct modular micro data centers directly on-site at operating solar farms.
The funding round was led by Spark Capital, with participation from Union Square Ventures, Lowercarbon Capital, Activate Capital, Committed Capital, Timeless Partners, and Logos Fund. The Series A brings Rune’s total funding to $53.5 million.
San Francisco-based Rune addresses critical AI power shortages by physically placing data center infrastructure inside existing solar installations. By installing hardware behind the meter, the modular units tap clipped and curtailed electricity straight from the array, bypassing utility grid connections, substations, and multi-year interconnection queues entirely.
Grid bottlenecks force utility-scale solar facilities across the United States to waste or curtail more than 50 TWh of generation annually, representing up to 20% of an operating plant’s output. Rune’s on-site RELIC enclosures connect directly to the solar field’s native DC power, eliminating AC conversion losses, using zero water cooling, and reducing non-compute capital costs by 85% compared to constructing traditional off-site facility builds.
Rune said its modular, on-site units take 60 minutes to physically deploy on location, bringing GPU clusters online in as little as six weeks. The company has already placed an active RELIC installation inside a 200 MW operating solar farm in Texas, running off-grid directly alongside the solar hardware without modifying the existing site footprint or transmission equipment.
“Every solar plant is a latent data center. The power is already there, sitting idle while AI labs wait years for grid connections that may never come,” said William Layden, Co-Founder and CEO of Rune. “We built RELIC to close that gap with compute that’s online in days, powered by energy the grid was throwing away.”
Rune was co-founded by Layden, a former clean energy executive at SoftBank Energy and Cube Hydro, and CTO Varun Palivela, a semiconductor architect formerly with NUVIA, Qualcomm, and Arm. The startup will use the new capital to secure additional host agreements with solar asset owners and scale its on-site compute footprint for enterprise AI clients.
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