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1. MARA AI expansion: what the Q3 letter announced
MARA Holdings, the bitcoin miner formerly known as Marathon Digital, laid out the next phase of its artificial intelligence expansion in its third-quarter 2026 shareholder letter, filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The letter reported a four-year, $79 million GPU-as-a-service contract signed by its subsidiary Exaion, rights to develop a Texas site with up to 2 gigawatts of power capacity, and progress toward buying an Ohio power plant.
Together the three items point in one direction. MARA is working to build a business beyond bitcoin mining, using its experience with large amounts of electricity and data center operations to serve customers who need computing capacity for artificial intelligence workloads. The announcements are a mix of a signed contract, which is concrete, and projects that still depend on approvals, which are not yet complete.
Each element is described in the company's own filings, which give readers a primary-source record of what has been signed and what is still conditional. That distinction is central to reading the announcement: the contract is binding, the Texas rights are conditional on power approval, and the Ohio plant purchase is waiting to close.
The letter is the most detailed statement yet of how the company intends to combine energy assets with computing infrastructure, an approach that several bitcoin miners have started to pursue as demand for AI computing grows.
2. What is the $79 million Exaion GPU contract?
The contract is a GPU-as-a-service agreement, meaning Exaion rents out access to graphics processing units, the chips that power AI model training and inference, instead of selling the hardware. It runs for four years and is worth $79 million, with Exaion's first customer in the United States.
Its most notable feature is that it is on 100% take-or-pay terms. Under such an arrangement the customer commits to paying for the reserved capacity whether or not it uses all of it. For the provider, that converts a variable revenue stream into a predictable one, and it protects the payments from swings in the customer's demand.
That protection matters for a business that must buy expensive chips and install them in advance. A take-or-pay structure helps cover the cost of that equipment over the life of the agreement. The company did not name the customer in its letter, and the details available publicly stop at the value, the term and the payment structure.
3. What is MARA planning in Matagorda County, Texas?
MARA said it secured the rights to develop a site in Matagorda County, Texas, with up to 2 gigawatts of power capacity. To put the size in context, a gigawatt is enough electricity to supply a large city, and few individual data center campuses are planned at that scale.
The company's filings describe land purchase contracts for the site and a letter agreement with an electric utility covering the 2,000 megawatts of capacity. The potential is conditional: payments to the sellers of the land depend on the power being approved, and the company has said it has made none to date.
That structure limits MARA's financial commitment until the key approval arrives, but it also means the project is an option rather than a finished asset. Power access is the most valuable and most constrained resource for data center developers, so securing rights to a large allocation can be strategically important even before construction begins.
4. How does the Long Ridge power plant acquisition fit in?
The third element is the planned purchase of Long Ridge Energy & Power LLC, which MARA agreed to acquire in April 2026. Its assets include a combined-cycle gas-fired power plant in Hannibal, Ohio, with a capacity of 485 megawatts, which is expected to increase to 505 megawatts in the first half of 2027. It also includes more than 1,600 contiguous acres with access to water, fiber and rail.
In the Q3 letter, MARA said it recently received approval from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the federal agency that oversees wholesale electricity markets and many power transactions. The deal had not closed at the time of the letter, so completion remains pending.
Owning generation changes the company's position. Instead of buying electricity from the grid and carrying the price risk, a company with its own plant and land can supply power directly to computing facilities. Water, fiber connectivity and rail access are practical requirements for large data centers, which explains why the acreage is part of the appeal.
5. Why does power approval decide the timeline?
For any large computing campus, electricity is the gating item. A developer needs a utility or grid operator to agree that a given amount of power can be delivered to a specific location, and that process can take years because it involves studies of the grid's capacity and the equipment needed to connect new demand. A request of up to 2 gigawatts is large enough that its review is likely to be extensive.
That is why MARA's filings emphasize that payments to the land sellers are contingent on approval. The arrangement lets the company hold a position on the site and its potential capacity while deferring the larger expenditure until the power question is settled. If approval were delayed or reduced, the scale and schedule of the project would change accordingly.
The same logic applies to regulatory sign-offs such as the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission review for Long Ridge. These approvals are procedural, but they set the pace of every project that depends on them, and a transaction can look final in a company letter while still waiting on the last step before closing.
6. How do GPU-as-a-service and take-or-pay terms work together?
A GPU-as-a-service provider buys or leases graphics processors, houses them in a facility with power and cooling, and rents their processing time to customers. The customer avoids the capital cost and the delay of buying chips directly, while the provider earns recurring revenue from the rental.
The weakness of that model is that the provider carries the up-front cost whether or not demand appears. Take-or-pay terms address the weakness by making the customer pay for reserved capacity regardless of usage. In the Exaion agreement, the 100% take-or-pay structure means the full contract value is protected, which gives the provider a clearer basis for financing the equipment.
Customers accept such terms because they secure scarce computing capacity for several years. In a market where demand for AI processors has often outpaced supply, a long commitment can be worth the loss of flexibility.
7. Why are bitcoin miners moving into AI computing?
Bitcoin miners and AI data centers need many of the same things: large amounts of reliable, affordable power, grid connections, cooling and sites approved for heavy industrial use. A miner that has already assembled these resources can adapt them to host AI computing, often faster than a newcomer starting from scratch.
The incentive also comes from the economics of mining itself. Mining revenue, as the industry's own reports show month after month, depends on the bitcoin price and on the network's difficulty, both of which change constantly and are outside a miner's control. Contracts to provide computing capacity, especially with take-or-pay terms, offer a steadier source of income than the open competition of mining.
For investors, the question is how the two businesses will coexist. Mining remains tied to the bitcoin market, while computing contracts follow a different cycle, so a company running both is exposed to two sets of conditions at once. Reporting that separates the revenue from each line will help shareholders judge which one is driving results, and whether the new activity is large enough to change the company's profile over time.
The shift has risks of its own. AI hardware is costly and ages quickly, projects take time to build, and the customer base is concentrated among a small number of large buyers. The Exaion contract illustrates both sides: a signed multi-year commitment, with a customer whose identity the company has not disclosed.
8. What to watch next for MARA
Several milestones will determine how much of the plan turns into revenue. The first is the power approval for the Texas site, since the land payments and the development timeline hinge on it. The second is the closing of the Long Ridge acquisition, which has cleared federal approval but is not yet complete.
The third is whether the Exaion contract is followed by additional agreements, and on what terms. Investors will look at whether future deals carry the same take-or-pay structure and whether the customer base broadens beyond a single buyer. They will also watch how the company funds the build-out, given that large power and computing projects require substantial capital.
The pace of delivery will also matter. A contract on paper produces revenue only once the chips are installed, powered and available to the customer, so execution on schedule is as important as the signing itself. Delays in equipment, power or construction would push back the point at which the $79 million starts to flow, and the market is likely to watch for updates on that timing in future letters.
For now, the Q3 letter establishes the direction of travel. MARA has one signed contract worth $79 million, an option on a site that could reach 2 gigawatts, and an ownership transaction awaiting completion, all part of an effort to turn a bitcoin mining business into one that also sells power and computing capacity.