MARA Swaps Bitcoin Miners for Megawatts in $600M Texas Land Grab 🔌

MARA Holdings has agreed to acquire more than 1,200 acres in Matagorda County, Texas, from synthetic-fuels developer HIF USA in a deal that could reach $600 million, the publicly traded Bitcoin mining company announced Thursday. The Miami-based miner said the site, roughly 90 miles southwest of Houston, comes with grid access for up to 1 gigawatt by October 2027 and up to 2 gigawatts by April 2028, pending ERCOT approval. HIF, which had promoted the location as the site of the first large e-fuels plant in the United States, will retain a minority stake once a computing tenant signs a lease. MARA shares rose more than 15% to a recent $13.87, per Yahoo Finance, lifting the stock's monthly gain above 4% and its year-to-date advance past 54%.

MARA plans to develop the property with Starwood Digital Ventures into a computing campus that could house both AI data centers and Bitcoin mining machines. The pitch for the site, originally backed by Texas Governor Greg Abbott for an approximately $7 billion fuel project, rests on permits and grid rights that can take years to secure in ERCOT's connection queue, where requests have climbed nearly 300% over the past year, almost all tied to data centers. "Power is the scarce input in AI… we are building a differentiated platform designed to maximize the value of every megawatt we control," Chairman and CEO Fred Thiel said in an April filing.

The deal terms stage most payments on milestones such as approvals and a signed tenant. At full 2-gigawatt buildout, the $600 million headline figure works out to roughly $300,000 per megawatt of grid access. MARA also expects to close a previously announced $1.5 billion acquisition of the 505-megawatt Long Ridge gas plant in Ohio, which the company says could push its total power portfolio to nearly 4.8 gigawatts. "This transaction advances our strategy of securing strategically located infrastructure assets capable of supporting high-performance compute and Bitcoin workloads," Thiel said in a statement.

The transaction fits a broader pivot underway across the mining sector, with peers such as Riot also selling Bitcoin to fund data-center expansions. Crypto markets entered the second week of July under pressure: $BTC was holding in the low $60,000s after briefly touching 21-month lows under $58,000 the prior week, $ETH was below $1,750, and the total crypto market cap excluding $BTC and $ETH has shed about 30% since January. Despite the drawdown, mining-linked equities including MARA have tracked AI sentiment more closely than spot crypto, and recent crypto IPOs Gemini, Bullish and BitGo have all slid below their debut prices.