Investors include Spark Capital, Union Square Ventures, Lowercarbon Capital, Activate Capital, Committed Capital, Timeless Partners, and Logos Fund.
RELIC units bring GPUs online in as little as six weeks and can be deployed in 60 minutes.
Solar plants waste up to 20% of their energy. Rune turns that into AI compute, no grid connection, no construction required.
SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Rune today unveiled RELIC (Renewable Energy Linked Intelligent Compute), a modular compute system that installs directly at solar generation sites, turning wasted power into high-performance compute capacity. Alongside the launch, Rune announced a $40 million Series A led by Spark Capital, with participation from Union Square Ventures, Lowercarbon Capital, Activate Capital, Committed Capital, Timeless Partners, and Logos Fund, bringing the company's total funding to $53.5 million.
Solar plants waste up to 20% of the energy they generate: power produced but never sold or delivered to the grid, an estimated 50-plus terawatt hours a year in the U.S. alone. RELIC taps that stranded electricity at the source, skipping the meter, the fees, and the grid infrastructure that has stalled AI buildout across the country.
“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.”
What RELIC Does
- Faster: Installs in 60 minutes. Compute customers are energized in as little as six weeks from contract, versus years for traditional data center builds.
- Cheaper: Cuts non-compute infrastructure costs by 85% compared to traditional AI data centers, $620 million in savings on a 100MW deployment.
- Non-Disruptive: Rune captures multiple sources of underutilized energy, including curtailed and clipped power, without disrupting core plant operations. It requires no heavy site prep, leaves no visible footprint and uses no water.
- Off-Grid by Design: Runs natively on DC, solar’s native output, eliminating AC conversion loss. No grid connection, no transformers, no utility approvals, no waiting.
RELIC in the Field
Rune is also revealing its latest deployment: a RELIC installation at a 200MW solar facility in Texas, live on an existing renewable asset with no site modifications, no grid work, and no construction.
“Demand for AI infrastructure is growing faster than it can be delivered. Rune deploys compute directly behind the meter at operating solar farms, converting clean power into rapidly scalable AI capacity,” said Santo Politi, Founder and General Partner of Spark Capital. “Every renewable asset in operation becomes a potential deployment site. Rune is the fastest path to new capacity we have seen.”
Built by People Who Understand Both Sides
Rune Co-founder and CEO William Layden previously ran a division of Cube Hydro that harnessed unused electricity from hydro plants to power clean bitcoin mining, and later evaluated technology across SoftBank Energy’s 1.7 GW solar portfolio. He served in the Obama White House. He holds an MBA from Harvard and a BA from NYU, where he graduated summa cum laude and as class valedictorian.
Co-Founder and CTO Varun Palivela is a chip architect with more than a decade of experience designing high-performance compute systems. At NUVIA, he helped develop one of the industry’s highest-performing microprocessor cores, work that contributed to Qualcomm’s $1.4 billion acquisition and now ships in the Snapdragon X Elite platform. He previously held design roles at Qualcomm, Arm and Marvell, holds multiple U.S. patents, and has experience spanning the full stack from silicon to power electronics to system integration.
“AI’s power constraint isn’t generation, it’s resource allocation,” said Varun Palivela, Co-Founder and CTO of Rune. “The industry is retrofitting data centers designed for a different era rather than rethinking the architecture itself. We built an entirely new technology stack from the ground up, coupling compute directly to clean generation so AI can scale here on Earth.”
RELIC is live across initial clean energy partner sites, with Rune actively expanding its pipeline of power partnerships and compute customers. Compute customers can reserve inference capacity and power partners can explore site opportunities at rune.energy.
About Rune
Rune turns solar plants into data centers. Its product, RELIC, delivers AI compute powered by renewable energy, with no grid connection, no construction, and deployment in as little as six weeks. Rune's drama-free data center model reduces non-compute infrastructure costs by 85% compared to traditional AI data centers. The company is backed by Spark Capital, Union Square Ventures, Lowercarbon Capital, Activate Capital, Vestas Ventures, Timeless Partners, Logos Fund, and Hersh Desai.
Contacts
Press Contact:
Max Lifton
VSC, on behalf of Rune
rune@vsc.co