MARA to Buy Long Ridge in $1.5B Deal — Adds 1 GW Power for AI Data Center Pivot

Bitcoin miner MARA Holdings agreed on April 30 to acquire Long Ridge Energy & Power from FTAI Infrastructure for $1.5 billion, in one of the largest industrial-asset purchases ever made by a publicly listed miner. The deal brings MARA a 505-megawatt combined-cycle natural-gas power plant in Hannibal, Ohio, plus more than 1,600 contiguous acres, and is the cornerstone of the company's pivot from a single-purpose Bitcoin miner into a full-stack power-and-compute utility serving HPC, AI workloads and mining.

How the deal is structured

The $1.5 billion price tag comprises the assumption of at least $785 million in existing project-level debt, with the balance paid in cash and backstopped by a bridge loan from Barclays. Closing is expected in Q3 2026, subject to Hart-Scott-Rodino antitrust clearance, FERC approval and other customary conditions. MARA expects the transaction to add approximately $144 million in annualized adjusted EBITDA based on second-half 2025 performance — a meaningful contribution given MARA's existing cash-flow profile, and one that converts a partially fluctuating mining business into something closer to contracted utility revenue. The site can scale to 1 gigawatt of total potential power capacity across both generation and load, increasing MARA's owned-and-operated power capacity by roughly 65%.

Why every miner is making this trade now

The MARA acquisition is the cleanest expression of a strategic reset across the public Bitcoin-mining sector. Three forces are converging. First, Bitcoin halvings compress hash-price economics on a four-year cycle, leaving miners with sub-scale exposure unless they consolidate or diversify. Second, AI compute demand has driven HPC and hyperscaler co-location pricing to all-time highs — Long Ridge's 1 GW path is being marketed for AI workloads at multiples of mining unit economics. Third, regulated power assets with grid interconnection and FERC-licensed generation are extraordinarily hard to permit from scratch (the typical greenfield timeline is 5–7 years), which means existing assets command an acquisition premium. Long Ridge's package — generation, land, water rights, transmission interconnection — is precisely the asset class hyperscalers have been struggling to lock down. Riot, CleanSpark, IREN and Core Scientific have all been pursuing variants of the same trade; MARA's $1.5B price tag re-anchors the comp set.

The skeptics' read

Three concerns. First, execution risk: integrating a 505 MW gas plant into a Bitcoin miner's operating model requires power-trading, NERC compliance, environmental permitting and HPC sales muscle that public miners have largely outsourced; MARA will need to hire or acquire that capability quickly. Second, capital intensity: at the $1.5B price plus $785M debt assumption, MARA's leverage profile changes materially; if AI co-location demand softens, the equity story compresses fast. Third, regulatory tone: the U.S. administration's emphasis on grid stability has made data-center power loads a contested political topic in multiple states; an Ohio gas plant pivoted toward AI compute will draw the kind of scrutiny that did not previously apply when its primary use was Bitcoin mining.

The miner-to-utility pivot is now visible across the public-mining cohort

Long Ridge is the cleanest expression of a strategic reset that has been visible in every public miner's recent disclosures. CleanSpark announced HPC co-location partnerships across its Georgia, Tennessee and Wyoming sites in Q1 2026. Riot Platforms reported that more than 40% of its incremental power capacity at Corsicana is being marketed to AI tenants rather than reserved for mining. IREN shifted reporting structure to break out HPC revenue separately, with management guiding to AI-compute revenue exceeding mining revenue by H2 2026. Core Scientific's $3.5B+ multi-year deal with CoreWeave remains the single largest miner-to-AI contract on record.

The shared logic is that permitted, grid-interconnected, behind-the-meter generation capacity is now a strategic asset, irrespective of whether the workload is mining or AI inference. The four-year halving cycle and the structurally lower hash-price economics make pure mining unappealing as a single-product business; the AI-compute demand curve makes the same physical infrastructure highly valuable. MARA's $1.5B price tag for Long Ridge is, in that lens, not a Bitcoin-mining transaction — it is the public-miner cohort beginning to compete with hyperscalers and infrastructure REITs for the same gigawatt-scale assets, and paying real-asset prices to do it.

BlockAI News' View

This is the deal that crystallizes the new operating thesis for public miners: own the power, monetize whichever workload pays. MARA's $1.5B mark sets a price floor for the next round of mining-sector M&A, and other listed miners with strong balance sheets — particularly those with public-market cost-of-capital advantages — should be expected to follow. Three signals over the next 60 days. HPC tenant disclosure: any named hyperscaler or AI-lab co-location signing at Long Ridge would convert the strategic story into a commercial one. FERC and HSR timeline: a smooth approval path closes the deal by September; any contestation pushes into 2027 and reprices the asset. Comp-sector response: watch Riot, CleanSpark, IREN and Core Scientific for parallel announcements within the quarter. Watch ir.mara.com and FERC docket eFiling for filings.

Every funding round, M&A and tokenholder move — first. Subscribe to BlockAI News.

How we report: This article cites primary sources, regulatory filings, and on-chain data where available. BlockAI News uses AI tools to assist with research and first-draft generation; every article is reviewed and edited by a human editor before publication. Read our full How We Report page, Editorial Policy, AI Use Policy, and Corrections Policy.