Marathon Digital Holdings announced on March 15th that it has signed a definitive agreement with Applied Digital to purchase a 200 megawatt (MW) Bitcoin mining facility in Texas for $87.3 million. The agreement specifies that Marathon will pay the purchase price in cash from its available assets and that the transaction will be finalized after all price adjustments are made.
Marathon Digital’s Notable Expansion Move
Marathon Digital‘s blog post about the acquisition states that this purchase will increase the company’s total Bitcoin mining capacity to approximately 1.1 gigawatts. This is slightly less than the 1.21 gigawatts of electricity needed to power the fictional Flux Capacitor in the Back to the Future movie series. Fred Thiel, Chairman and CEO of Marathon, commented on the matter:
“This transaction enhances our impact on our current operations, reduces our cost per token on site by approximately 20%, and provides us with an additional 100 megawatts of capacity to expand into. Following the completion of this transaction and the expansion of the site within this year, our Bitcoin mining portfolio will consist of approximately 1.1 gigawatts of capacity, 54% of which will be located at sites we own and operate, and will be diversified across eleven sites on three continents.”
As recently reported, Marathon Digital achieved its best performance in 2023 with revenues of $387.5 million, a 229% increase over the previous year and a 452% increase in the fourth quarter. The surge in revenue is attributed to the Bitcoin rally at the end of 2023 and a year-over-year increase of 147% in Bitcoin production for Marathon Digital.
Marathon Digital and the Upcoming Halving Process
At the end of February, Marathon introduced a new direct Bitcoin transaction sending service called Slipstream. This new service was designed to facilitate and accelerate large and non-standard transactions on the Bitcoin blockchain network and has since been implemented.
Next up, mining companies like Marathon Digital will need to manage the upcoming halving process. This event, which occurs after a certain number of blocks have been mined on the Bitcoin blockchain network, is expected to take place in mid-April. The halving could have a significant impact on large-scale mining organizations, as the rewards for mining a block will be reduced by 50%, from 6.25 Bitcoins per block to 3.125 Bitcoins.
