Bitcoin miner MARA Holdings has agreed to buy Long Ridge Energy & Power from FTAI Infrastructure for $1.5 billion, lifting its total power capacity by 65 per cent to 2.2 GW and turning its data-centre pivot into the largest deal a public bitcoin miner has ever signed.
MARA Holdings will pay $1.5 billion for Long Ridge Energy & Power, the company said on Wednesday — the largest deal any publicly traded bitcoin miner has ever signed and a clear signal that the industry's leaders are no longer pretending to be hashrate businesses.
The headline number is misleading. Of the $1.5 billion price tag, MARA is assuming at least $785 million in existing debt that FTAI Infrastructure had already piled onto the asset. The cash component is backstopped by a Barclays bridge loan. What MARA actually gets in return is a 505 MW combined-cycle gas plant in Hannibal, Ohio, more than 1,600 contiguous acres, and roughly $144 million in annualised adjusted EBITDA based on second-half 2025 performance. The cash starts flowing the day the deal closes.
That is the part Wall Street cared about. MARA shares jumped on the news and held the move into the close, a rare reaction for a bitcoin miner announcing a multi-billion-dollar capital outlay in a soft tape. The market has spent the last twelve months punishing miners that buy more rigs and rewarding miners that buy more megawatts. Long Ridge is megawatts the company already controls power for, with grid interconnection done and a turbine commissioned.
The combined transaction lifts MARA's total power capacity by roughly 65 per cent to 2.2 GW. Management has flagged a mid-2028 target for AI data-centre buildout on the site, which gives them roughly two years to convert the campus from a hashrate-and-power-arbitrage operation into the kind of liquid-cooled tenant infrastructure hyperscalers are queuing for. Long Ridge sits on top of Marcellus and Utica gas — cheap, abundant, and behind-the-meter — which is the single biggest reason the asset is worth what FTAI is selling it for.
MARA isn't the only miner running this play. Riot Platforms reported $33.2 million in first-quarter data-centre revenue last week, its first non-mining income, after AMD doubled its Rockdale, Texas footprint and took an option on 150 MW. The same company sold 3,778 bitcoin for $289 million in Q1 to fund the buildout, an explicit reallocation away from a coin treasury and into power infrastructure. Core Scientific is converting a 300 MW Pecos site into a 1.5 GW AI campus. The pattern is consistent: take the power, keep the rigs running for cashflow, and quietly rebrand as a digital-infrastructure company before bitcoin halves its block reward again. As we noted last month, bitcoin miners are on track to earn more from AI than from bitcoin by year-end, and Long Ridge is what that thesis looks like in practice — a balance sheet expanding into power, not into ASICs.
The structure of the deal also tells you something about how much leverage MARA had. Long Ridge runs a single 505 MW combined-cycle plant, an interconnection that took years to clear PJM, and a private-equity sponsor in FTAI that has been openly looking to monetise infrastructure assets for two quarters running. The price MARA agreed to pay implies an EV/EBITDA multiple in line with conventional gas plants, not the strategic premium that has been attached to AI-ready power deals over the last six months. FTAI got a clean exit. MARA got the asset before the multiple expanded.
Closing is the open question. The transaction needs Hart-Scott-Rodino clearance, FERC approval and a series of consents tied to the existing project debt, and is targeted for the second half of the year. FERC review of any large gas-fired generator now routinely runs longer than buyers anticipate, particularly where co-located bitcoin and AI loads are involved. MARA has said it will refinance the bridge loan with a mix of permanent debt and equity, which means the eventual capital structure won't be visible until after the deal closes. The Barclays bridge gives them speed; it doesn't give them certainty on cost.
What makes the announcement matter beyond MARA's own accounts is the precedent. Until this week, the largest acquisition by a public bitcoin miner was Riot's $400 million purchase of Block Mining in 2024. MARA has just tripled that benchmark with a single deal, and the market rewarded the move rather than penalising the dilution. The next public miner that wants to be taken seriously as an infrastructure business now has to write a similarly large cheque. The smaller operators that can't won't be left behind by hashrate competition. They'll be left behind by the cost of capital.
