The $600 million in new loans from Coinbase and Two Prime is earmarked for Long Ridge, a 505 MW Ohio site MARA wants to expand toward two gigawatts for AI hosting.
MARA Holdings borrowed $600 million against its bitcoin last week, pledging 18,750 BTC to Coinbase and Two Prime to help fund the purchase of the Long Ridge Energy campus in Hannibal, Ohio. The two loans lift the share of MARA's treasury sitting behind lender wallets past 54 per cent.
Coinbase Prime wrote the larger cheque: $450 million at the midpoint of the federal funds target range plus 3.875 per cent, refinancing an earlier $150 million line in the process. Two Prime's $300 million loan carries a fixed 7.65 per cent coupon. Both facilities mature in August 2028, giving MARA a two-year runway to draw down the acquisition and put the collateral back to work.
Long Ridge is not a mining site in the way MARA's current fleet is. It is a 505 megawatt combined-cycle gas plant sitting on more than 1,600 contiguous acres, with an enterprise value the company puts near $1.5 billion including assumed debt. The plan is to expand the site toward two gigawatts of dispatchable capacity and route the extra power to AI and high-performance computing customers alongside the existing miners. Closing is scheduled for 30 November, subject to regulatory approval.
That framing tells you where MARA thinks its margins are. Bitcoin mining still produces cash, but revenue per megawatt of AI compute at spot power is now materially higher than revenue per megawatt of hashrate at post-halving economics. Pledging bitcoin to buy a power plant rather than more ASICs is the clearest possible admission of that gap. The company is converting a liquid but volatile balance-sheet asset into a fixed one it thinks will earn more than the interest on the loan. It is also a straight continuation of the strategic pivot MARA telegraphed in Q1, when it sold 20,880 coins and started filing as a compute company.
MARA is not the only public miner turning bitcoin into concrete and copper. IREN raised its AI-cloud revenue target to $4 billion after pre-selling its first hyperscaler capacity, and Hyperscale Data flipped a Michigan bitcoin mine into a $1.2 billion AI compute contract inside two weeks of buying the site. Long Ridge is the largest such move by asset size to date, and the first funded almost entirely with BTC collateral rather than equity issuance or convertible debt.
The lending pattern is telling. Since the summer bridge failures thinned US bitcoin credit markets, Coinbase Prime is one of the few venues writing eight- and nine-figure tickets against BTC without demanding physical custody transfer. MARA's refinancing of the earlier $150 million line into the new $450 million facility is what these products are built to do: keep the client rolling debt inside the platform rather than shopping outside it. Two Prime's willingness to add $300 million at a fixed 7.65 per cent suggests margin-loan demand is returning on the treasury-company side even as spot ETF inflows sag.
MARA's own treasury math is now the constraint. The company held 35,577 BTC at the end of Q2, valued at roughly $2.1 billion at the quarter's $58,524 average price. This week's 18,750-coin pledge combines with earlier facilities to push encumbered coins past half of the total. Assuming a maintenance loan-to-value in the 40-to-50 per cent range typical for these bilateral deals, MARA has swapped a big slice of its optionality for cash; any move down in bitcoin narrows the buffer before the lender's margin desk starts making calls.
None of this makes the acquisition itself a good one. Long Ridge sits in a state with slow interconnect queues, the two-gigawatt target is aspirational rather than permitted, and gas-plant retrofits for AI hyperscalers have a history of running late and over budget. What MARA has locked in is the financing, not the outcome. Of its 35,577 bitcoin, 18,750 are now collateral against loans that mature in the summer of 2028.
