MARA bets $1.5 billion on Ohio power plant to anchor flagship AI campus
MARA Holdings, a publicly traded energy and compute infrastructure firm, is spending $1.5 billion to buy a natural gas power plant in Ohio. The deal, announced today, is one of the clearest signals yet that the boundary between crypto mining companies and energy companies is disappearing. The target is Long Ridge Energy & Power, a subsidiary of FTAI Infrastructure that operates a 505-megawatt combined-cycle gas turbine plant in Hannibal, Ohio. The transaction includes roughly $785 million in assumed debt, backstopped by a bridge loan from Barclays. MARA gets the power plant, over 1,600 acres of contiguous land, rail infrastructure, water access, fiber connectivity, and a fuel supply pipeline. The economics Long Ridge is expected to generate roughly $144 million in annualized adjusted EBITDA, operating at under $15 per megawatt-hour in all-in costs. The acquisition will increase MARA‘s owned and operated power capacity by approximately 65%, pushing the company’s total footprint to around 2.2 gigawatts across the PJM, ERCOT, SPP, and international markets. MARA already has a 200-megawatt data center co-located at the Long Ridge site, and the company says its fielding interest from investment-grade AI and critical IT tenants. Construction on an initial AI buildout is targeted to begin in the first half of 2027, with capacity expected