Project Sophie data center, Murray, Kentucky

Soluna's Project Sophie is a 25 megawatt data center at Murray, Kentucky, that went live in the last quarter of 2021. It came up in July 2026 when the Calloway County Fiscal Court held the first reading of a 12 month moratorium on data centers.

Soluna called Sophie its first greenfield project, named it for Sophie Wilson, who helped invent ARM chip technology, and prefabricated its buildings at a factory in Kentucky so they could be bolted together on site. In October 2025 it agreed to run about 3.3 megawatts of bitcoin mining machines at Sophie for KULR Technology Group, a company that keeps bitcoin in its treasury, with operations expected to begin in the last quarter of that year.

Magistrate Paul Rister, who brought the moratorium, described Sophie as a bitcoin mining facility rather than a hyperscale data center and said the moratorium would block any expansion of its footprint. He said Soluna's local administrator, Corey Childs, had sent the draft to his bosses in New York, knew of no plans to expand, and "had no issue personally with this moratorium." "It's not a moratorium to say that we don't want data centers," Rister said; it would give the county time to study electrical demand and see what the state legislature does. Judge-Executive Kenny Imes said an ordinance needs two readings and a clearer definition of a data center: "Data centers are new to everybody, and the irony of the thing is that we get our data probably from some data center somewhere."

Inside the city, a Murray Planning Commission hearing on June 9 drew more than 100 people, and the council held its own hearing on data center rules the same week the county took up its moratorium. The Murray City Council approved its data center ordinance unanimously on second reading on August 13, 2026, stopping short of the outright ban some residents wanted. "Our ability to help you stops at the city limit," council member Joe Darnall told residents, urging them to take their concerns to the county, state and federal governments.