Marathon Digital Holdings announced on March 15 that it has entered into a definitive agreement with Applied Digital to purchase a 200-megawatt (MW) Bitcoin mining facility located in Texas for $87.3 million.

The agreement specifies that Marathon will pay the purchase price in cash from its holdings, making the transaction final once all price adjustments are settled.

Per a post on Marathon Digital’s blog, the acquisition will bring the company’s total Bitcoin (BTC) mining capacity to approximately 1.1 gigawatts of capacity — just shy of the 1.21 gigawatts of electricity needed to power the fictional “Flux Capacitor” from the Back to The Future film franchise.

Fred Thiel, Marathon’s chairman and CEO, commented:

“This transaction increases our influence over our current operations, reduces our cost per coin by approximately 20% at the site, and provides us with an additional 100 megawatts of capacity in which to expand. […] Following the close of this transaction and the anticipated expansion of the site this year, our Bitcoin mining portfolio will consist of approximately 1.1 gigawatts of capacity, 54% of which will reside on sites we directly own and operate, and all of which are diversified across eleven sites on three continents.”

Marathon Digital had its best-performing revenue year in 2023, raking in $387.5 million — up 229% from the previous year and 452% for the fourth quarter.

The increase in revenue was attributed to the Bitcoin rally of late 2023 and a 147% increase in Bitcoin production year-over-year for Marathon Digital.

In late February, Marathon unveiled a new direct Bitcoin transaction submission service. Called “Slipstream,” the new service was designed and implemented to facilitate and speed up large and/or non-standard transactions on the Bitcoin blockchain.

Next up, mining companies such as Marathon Digital will have to navigate the impending Bitcoin halving. This event, which will occur once a certain amount of blocks have been mined on the Bitcoin blockchain — currently, it’s anticipated to occur in mid-April — could have an outsized effect on large-scale mining organizations. The rewards for mining a block will be reduced by 50% from 6.25 BTC to 3.125 BTC per block.