
Turning Wasted Renewable Power into AI Compute with Rune
From Inevitable by an MCJ podcast
February 17, 2026 · 39 min
About this episode
William Layden discusses how Rune's technology converts wasted renewable energy into usable compute power.
William Layden is Co-founder and CEO at Rune, a company building modular, behind-the-meter micro data centers that plug directly into solar and wind plants. These units operate on a fully electric, DC-to-DC architecture—bypassing the traditional grid and unlocking new economics for compute at renewable energy sites. In this episode of Inevitable, Layden explains how solar clipping and curtailment leave vast amounts of clean power stranded—and how Rune’s “RELIC” units turn that waste into usable compute. The conversation dives into DC architecture, Bitcoin as a beachhead market, and why traditional data centers are ill-suited to an era of distributed energy. Layden also unpacks why modular infrastructure may be the fastest path to deploying AI-scale compute at the edge of the energy transition.
People in this episode
Guest: William Layden
Topics covered
- renewable energy
- data centers
- AI compute
- solar power
- wind power
Keywords
- modular infrastructure
- DC architecture
- Bitcoin
- energy transition
Mentioned in this episode
Products: RELIC units
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