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MARA Holdings is buying land again, and the target tells you exactly where the company is headed. The Bitcoin miner formerly known as Marathon Digital has signed a definitive agreement to acquire a large-scale powered site in Matagorda County, Texas, from sustainable-fuels firm HIF USA.
The prize isn’t the dirt. It’s the power. The site comes with a path to as much as 2 gigawatts of grid capacity, and MARA wants it for AI-grade computing as much as for mining coins.
The Deal In Brief
According to MARA’s July 9 announcement, the site sits roughly 90 miles southwest of Houston. Here’s what’s on the table:
- Size: More than 1,200 acres in Matagorda County, Texas.
- Power: Up to an initial 1 GW of grid capacity by October 2027, scaling to as much as 2 GW by April 2028.
- Use case: A digital infrastructure campus for high-performance computing (HPC) workloads and flexible compute, including Bitcoin mining.
- Partner: Developed through MARA’s existing partnership with Starwood Digital Ventures.
- HIF’s stake: HIF keeps a minority ownership interest once MARA signs a lease with an HPC tenant.
- Jobs: Thousands of construction and permanent roles expected on completion.
One thing the release doesn’t mention: the price. MARA and HIF stayed quiet on what the deal cost, which is its own kind of tell.
Bitcoin Mining Becomes “Flexible Compute”
Read the language closely and the strategic shift is obvious. Bitcoin mining now sits in the release as one item under “flexible compute,” not the headline act. The headline act is HPC, the polite industry shorthand for AI data centers.
MARA says the site has already drawn interest from potential HPC tenants. That’s the whole game now for the big public miners: use the cheap-power expertise built for Bitcoin to land AI customers paying far richer margins for the same electrons.
CEO Fred Thiel didn’t hide the thesis. He framed sites with access to reliable, scalable power as assets that will only get more valuable as demand climbs.
The Power Math
The capacity numbers are where this gets serious. MARA says full energization of the site would more than double its potential power capacity to roughly 4.8 GW across its portfolio.
That figure includes the anticipated close of MARA’s separately announced deal to buy Long Ridge Energy & Power. Stack it all together and MARA is positioning less as a miner and more as a power-and-compute developer that happens to mine Bitcoin on the side.
The buildout won’t be instant. Phased construction is expected to start in 2026, contingent on regulatory approvals, with grid capacity arriving in stages through 2028.
Texas, Jobs, And What’s Missing
MARA is leaning hard on the local-economy angle. The company says it has already sunk more than $1.2 billion into Texas and plans to keep spending to build what it calls a premier digital infrastructure campus.
HIF, for its part, gets to cash in on infrastructure while staying in the game. HIF USA CEO Renato Pereira pitched the project as a powerful economic anchor for Matagorda County and confirmed the company has issued a Notice to Proceed on the switchyard that will wire the site to the grid. HIF keeps building advanced-fuels facilities on its other sites.