MARA Holdings agreed to acquire Long Ridge Energy & Power for $1.5 billion, adding a 505 MW gas plant and 1,600 acres in Ohio with over 1 GW of future capacity — the largest single infrastructure investment by a Bitcoin miner into AI computing, raising its total power pipeline to 2.2 GW and signaling that the BTC mining industry's strategic pivot to AI is now an acquisition-scale transformation.
MARA Holdings agreed to acquire Long Ridge Energy & Power for $1.5 billion, adding a 505 MW gas plant and 1,600 acres in Ohio with over 1 GW of future capacity — the largest single infrastructure investment by a Bitcoin miner into AI computing, raising its total power pipeline to 2.2 GW and signaling that the BTC mining industry's strategic pivot to AI is now an acquisition-scale transformation.
MARA Holdings (MARA), the world's second-largest publicly traded Bitcoin miner by hashrate, has agreed to buy Long Ridge Energy & Power in a deal valued at approximately $1.5 billion. MARA will also assume at least $785 million of debt backstopped by a bridge loan. The seller, FTAI Infrastructure (FIP), rose 12% on the news; MARA gained 3%.
The deal includes Long Ridge's 505-megawatt combined-cycle gas plant in Hannibal, Ohio, along with more than 1,600 acres of land, water access, fiber links, fuel supply, and grid connections, according to the SEC filing. MARA said the site could support more than 1 gigawatt of total power capacity over time.
This is not an exploration or a pilot program. MARA plans to start construction on an initial AI and critical IT buildout in the first half of 2027, with first capacity targeted for mid-2028. The company does not expect to cut Long Ridge's current power supply to the PJM grid.
This is the single largest infrastructure acquisition by a Bitcoin miner to pivot into AI computing. The Bitcoin mining-to-AI transformation thesis — which has been discussed since Core Scientific's 200 MW deal with CoreWeave in 2024 — just graduated from pilot programs to billion-dollar acquisitions.
MARA is paying $1.5 billion not to mine more Bitcoin, but to build data centers that will likely run NVIDIA GPUs for AI workloads. The 505 MW gas plant provides baseload power — the scarcest resource in AI computing — while the 1,600 acres of land with existing grid connections eliminates the 2-5 year bottleneck that hyperscalers face when building new data centers from scratch.
The expected $144M in annualized EBITDA from Long Ridge's existing energy operations provides immediate cash flow while the AI buildout ramps. This is a financial engineering move as much as a strategic one: MARA is buying revenue-generating energy infrastructure and then layering AI compute on top of it.
The 65% increase in MARA's power pipeline to 2.2 GW puts it in a different category of company. For context, that's roughly 2% of total U.S. data center power capacity — a staggering amount for a company that was purely a Bitcoin miner 18 months ago.
| Company | AI/HPC Strategy | Power Capacity | Deal Size | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Core Scientific | CoreWeave 200 MW hosting deal | ~1 GW | Multi-year contract | Operating |
| Iris Energy | Childress, TX AI site | ~600 MW development | Self-funded | Building |
| Hut 8 | Vega acquisition (Ontario) | ~670 MW pipeline | ~$150M | Acquired |
| MARA Holdings | Long Ridge Energy acquisition | 2.2 GW pipeline | $1.5B | Announced Apr 30 |
| Applied Digital | Cloud & AI hosting | ~500 MW | Various | Operating |
MARA's $1.5B deal is 10x larger than any previous miner-to-AI transaction. The scale signals that the pivot is no longer experimental — it's a core business strategy.
The Bitcoin miner-to-AI-data-center convergence is happening at exactly the moment when AI compute demand is outstripping supply. hyperscalers (Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta) have committed $650B+ to AI infrastructure in 2026 alone, but new data center buildout is constrained by power availability, permitting, and transmission — not by demand.
Bitcoin miners already have power. They bought it, negotiated for it, and in many cases built substations and transmission lines for it. That infrastructure — built for SHA-256 hash computation — can be repurposed for GPU compute with relatively modest modifications. The value isn't in the mining equipment; it's in the power contracts, land, and grid connections.
NVIDIA reports earnings May 20. The demand signal from MARA's $1.5B infrastructure bet is a leading indicator: if miners are willing to spend billions to reposition toward AI compute, the demand for NVIDIA's next-generation GPUs is far from peaking.
The PJM grid (where Long Ridge is located) is the largest wholesale electricity market in North America. MARA's commitment to maintaining current power supply to the grid while building AI capacity is likely a nod to regulatory and community concerns about data centers straining local power infrastructure. This approach — co-locating AI compute with existing power generation — may become a model for future data center development.
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