Green Compute (SN 110) Put 240 RTX 5090s on British Farms Without Filing a Single Grid Application

Britain's National Energy System Operator counted roughly 140 data centres waiting in the electricity connection queue this year, about 50GW of demand, and only 71 of them, close to 20GW, had actually secured funding and a Final Investment Decision.

Green Compute, the operator behind Bittensor subnet 110, brought 240 RTX 5090s online this month, roughly $3 million of permanent hardware, without filing a connection application at all. Its miners work UK farms that already generate their own electricity, mostly anaerobic digesters burning methane the farm would otherwise vent into the air, and the GPUs sit right next to the generator.

That placement decision, called siting, is the whole pie. Instead of building a data hall and buying power from the grid, Green Compute puts its hardware directly at the source of the electricity. Power stops being a bill you negotiate and becomes a resource you're already standing on, and since power is the single biggest running cost of a GPU fleet, this one choice sets the margin before a single customer signs a contract.

Green Compute booked more than $82,000 of profitable revenue in its first month on Bittensor and put 10% of contract revenue into an alpha buyback on the open market. The siting explains the margin, the customer base explains why they stay, and the new cluster is the clearest test yet of both claims.

Payment on Subnet 110 Depends on Proving the Power Is Clean

Bittensor already has several compute subnets. Chutes (SN64) sells serverless inference, Targon (SN4) sells attested compute through hardware-verified enclaves, and Lium (SN51) rents high-end nodes by the hour, all competing on price, speed, and availability.

Green Compute competes on a different question entirely. Before a miner gets paid anything, the network checks two things: where the electricity actually comes from and where the hardware physically sits. A farm has to show real records for its digester or solar array and prove its GPUs are plugged in exactly where it says they are. No proof, no payout, in the subnet's own words.

Verified-green miners get priority when emissions are handed out, so being clean isn't a marketing claim here. It's the difference between getting paid and not. Whether that check holds up once operators outside the UK start applying, where the paperwork proving clean power is thinner and harder to audit, is the open question.

Enterprise Buyers Pay for Certainty, Not for the Cheapest Idle Hour

Green Compute lists two SKUs and nothing else, starting at $0.40 per GPU hour for an RTX 4090 and $0.70 for a 5090, served through an OpenAI-compatible endpoint. Two cards instead of a dozen means every buyer audits one machine image and troubleshoots one setup when something breaks at 3am.

Josh Riddett founded Green Compute, and before that he spent nine years building Easy Compute, a UK business that sells GPU hardware and infrastructure to enterprise clients. Green Compute inherited Easy Compute's existing customer relationships, and Riddett sums up the arrangement as business in the front, TAO in the back.

That inheritance cuts both ways. Easy Compute currently supplies both the demand relationships and most of the verified hardware, so subnet 110 today reads as one operator's business with a Bittensor incentive layer attached. Decentralizing that depends on solar, hydro, and geothermal miners outside the UK clearing the same verification bar in real numbers.

The customers Riddett is chasing want permanent dedicated capacity on contracts running six to twelve months, identical servers, on-site staff, bare-metal access, and confidence the hardware will still be racked in 24 months. A network built from scattered idle consumer GPUs struggles to promise any of that, which is why Green Compute stays out of the spot market OpenRouter and most compute subnets fight over, as Bittensor commentator Tyler DurdΞth argued in a widely shared breakdown of the subnet.

Every Paying Customer Brings Alpha Buybacks

Here's how the money moves: A customer pays Green Compute in ordinary dollars to run inference. Green Compute converts 10% of that payment into TAO and uses it to buy SN110's alpha token on the open market, then locks the tokens away in the treasury rather than reselling them.

In June, that produced a buyback of $8,200, 37 TAO, and Green Compute published the wallet address so anyone holding SN110 alpha can check the transaction. The same month brought a compute partnership with Vocence (SN78).

One buyback that size doesn't move a token's price on its own. What matters is where the demand comes from. A paying customer, not a trader betting on the chart, is the reason alpha gets bought, and that gives miners a reason to keep their GPUs pointed at 110 instead of chasing whichever subnet is paying out most this week.

A second channel works alongside the buyback. Green Compute discounts on-demand rentals for customers who pay in alpha instead of dollars, so a buyer trying to cut their compute bill has a reason to hold the token before they even rent a card.

The Verdict

Every other operator in AI infrastructure negotiates a power contract and waits years for a place in the connection queue. Green Compute skipped that queue by building where the electricity already exists, wired 240 GPUs straight into a working farm, and billed its first enterprise customer the same month. The advantage was never having to ask permission for power.

If you hold SN110 alpha, don't draw a conclusion from one buyback. Watch the second and third buybacks, because a percentage of contract revenue only compounds once the customer base grows past what Easy Compute already had on its books before SN110 existed. The wallet is public: 5D2UXtzXhP2YCgreodgrGMs2niVZWv2Xt7cxJwYWioU6hdTH. Every buyback posts there before anyone writes a headline about it, so check it yourself rather than take the next announcement on faith.