MARA Announces $79 Million GPU Computing Contract With Exaion’s First U.S. Customer
Key Facts
MARA Holdings said its Exaion subsidiary signed a four-year contract for GPU computing services with a total value of $79 million with its first U.S. customer. In its third-quarter shareholder letter filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the company said the contract requires full payment for the contracted capacity, even if the customer does not use it. The deal gives Exaion a disclosed U.S. commercial agreement as MARA works to expand from bitcoin mining into computing services and infrastructure related to artificial intelligence. The payment clause means the customer’s financial obligation does not depend on actual use of the capacity, according to the company’s description of the contract terms. MARA has presented mining as its operational foundation and a source of flexibility and revenue at its sites as it develops infrastructure opportunities it views as higher-value.
MARA said customer and prospective-customer demand for Exaion’s services had built a pipeline with a total value exceeding $3 billion, with about $1 billion of that amount targeted for delivery by the end of 2027. But it described these figures as demand indicators and stressed that they are not signed contracts or confirmed commitments. The pipeline value therefore differs from the announced contract with the U.S. customer, for which the company specified a value, duration and payment terms. The significance of the pipeline depends on those indicators becoming actual agreements and then capacity being delivered to customers on the targeted schedule. More broadly, MARA described Exaion’s business as including private cloud services, inference and GPU computing as a service.
On energy, MARA said it had secured development rights to a site in Matagorda County, Texas, with potential capacity of up to 2 gigawatts. The site was classified as a studied load in the Electric Reliability Council of Texas’s Batch Zero process, according to the shareholder letter. The company added that it was working with the utility to deliver power to the site and had not paid the sellers as of the date of the letter. The announced figure remains potential site capacity: MARA disclosed in its quarterly report that there was no guarantee it would be allocated all or any part of the 2,000 megawatts. The grid interconnection study was scheduled for completion in the first half of 2027, but the company warned that a government review could delay the timeline.
MARA’s acquisition of the Long Ridge power plant in Ohio received approval from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission on November 5, 2026, according to the company’s announcement. MARA said at the time that the deal was expected to close in the following weeks, subject to customary conditions. The transaction includes a combined-cycle natural gas plant with a nominal capacity of 505 megawatts and more than 1,600 connected acres. At the time of the announcement, the plant was authorized to sell 485 megawatts, while the company expected to raise capacity to its full nominal level in the first half of 2027. MARA said Long Ridge and its existing operations at the site together represent more than 1 gigawatt of total potential capacity, and that it does not expect to reduce the plant’s current supplies to the PJM grid.
These plans reflect an expansion of the energy base that MARA says it owns or is developing. In its third-quarter results announcement, the company said it had 1.9 gigawatts of energized capacity across about 20 sites on four continents, and a path to reach about 4.8 gigawatts. At the same time, the quarterly results showed a divergence between revenue and net income: revenue was $164.2 million, down 35% from $252.4 million in the third quarter of 2025, while net income rose to $632.1 million from $123.1 million. The company produced 2,247 bitcoin during the quarter, up 5% from the same period in 2025, but down 7% compared with the second quarter of 2026. After the quarter ended, MARA sold about 13,597 bitcoin at about $81,039 per coin, generating proceeds of about $1.1 billion, and used $750 million to repay bitcoin-backed loans.
The timelines for turning energy and computing plans into operating capacity vary across projects. The Texas site’s interconnection study is scheduled for the first half of 2027, with a possibility of delay and no guarantee of capacity allocation, while MARA is targeting the full nominal capacity at Long Ridge in the first half of the same year after the acquisition closes. For Exaion, the company said it was targeting the signing of two lease agreements before the end of 2026, but noted that market conditions are changing and the timing could extend into the following year. These targeted agreements are not equivalent to the non-binding demand indicators the company announced, and execution depends on project progress and terms. MARA shares closed at $6.64 on November 9 and were down 27.90% over three months and 57.38% over 12 months, according to Investing.com.