Marathon Digital Holdings announced that it has reached an agreement with Applied Digital to purchase a 200 megawatt (MW) Bitcoin mining facility in Texas for $87.3 million. This acquisition will be paid for in cash from Marathon’s holdings, and will be finalized once all price adjustments are completed.
The acquisition will increase Marathon’s total Bitcoin mining capacity to approximately 1.1 gigawatts, which powers the fictional “Flux Capacitor” from the movie Back to The Future. That’s roughly equivalent to the 1.21 gigawatts needed to do it. Fred Thiel, Marathon’s Chairman and CEO, noted that the transaction will provide increased operational control, reduce field costs by approximately 20%, and provide an additional 100 MW of capacity for expansion.
Marathon Digital had a successful year with revenue of $387.5 million in 2023, up 229% from the previous year. This growth is due to the Bitcoin rally at the end of 2023 and a 147% year-on-year increase in Bitcoin production.
In late February, Marathon introduced a new direct Bitcoin transaction submission service called “Slipstream,” designed to facilitate and accelerate large or non-standard transactions on the Bitcoin blockchain.
Looking to the future, Marathon Digital will have to navigate the upcoming Bitcoin halving, which is expected to occur in mid-April. This event will reduce the per-block reward from 6.25 BTC to 3.125 BTC, potentially impacting large-scale mining operations such as Marathon.