Galaxy and MARA Are Buying Up Texas Like It's Going Out of Style

Galaxy Digital just dropped half a billion dollars' worth of Texas ambition on a 500-acre plot in McGregor. They're building their second major AI and high-performance computing data center campus in the state—the first one, Helios, is already churning along in West Texas with over 1.6 GW of ERCOT-approved capacity. This new site kicks off with a 74 MW phase in 2028, then balloons to multi-hundred megawatts by 2030.

Meanwhile, MARA Holdings is making them look conservative. They're acquiring 1,200+ acres from HIF USA in Matagorda County, securing up to 2 GW of grid capacity by April 2028. The deal runs up to $600 million—roughly $300,000 per megawatt when it's fully built out.

Here's the interesting bit: these aren't your dad's Bitcoin miners anymore. Once upon a time, crypto companies mined blocks and called it a day. Now they're playing infrastructure landlord, chasing the same scarce electrons that Meta and AI labs are desperately bidding for. Meta itself just announced a $14 billion data center campus in El Paso, so the competitive heat is real.

Why Texas? ERCOT—the independent grid operator—gives them substantial capacity and rates that don't make you weep. The collaborative approach matters too. Galaxy's working with the City of McGregor and the Heart of Texas Electric Cooperative; MARA's partnering with Starwood Digital Ventures. This isn't a lone operator wrestling with the grid. It's companies building relationships with local economic development boards because you can't just show up and demand electrons anymore.

Galaxy's also clever about the electricity angle. They're funding their own private substation on the McGregor campus, meaning local rate payers don't shoulder the cost of infrastructure. The City of McGregor pocketed $7.5 million in land revenue just from the sale—a decent sweetener for the locals.

The economics tell you everything. When Fred Thiel, MARA's CEO, says reliable power access is the fundamental constraint on growth, he's not being poetic. He means it. Control the power, you control the compute. The scarcest resource wins.

MARA's playing it differently. The HIF deal is milestone-contingent—meaning payments are tied to actual grid delivery. After everything energizes, MARA says their portfolio hits 4.8 GW, more than doubling their current capacity. They're already running the Long Ridge transaction alongside this; now they're stacking it higher.

This convergence is reshaping two industries at once. Crypto miners aren't just miners anymore. They're power developers. And Texas—sitting on independent grid infrastructure and hungry for economic development deals—has become the proving ground. Not California. Not New York. Texas, where the politics align and the electrons are still available.

The timing isn't accidental. Both companies are signalling that whoever locks down reliable, scalable power first owns the next decade of infrastructure. Bitcoin mining, AI workloads, HPC—they all want the same thing. Whoever controls the power wins the game.

Source & further reading:

• Galaxy, MARA Holdings deepen Texas expansion with land acquisitions — Cointelegraph
• Coinbase wants to be Canada’s ‘everything exchange,’ but says clearer rules are needed first — CoinDesk
• 'Anything remotely dovish' from Fed could be good for bitcoin, says analyst — CoinDesk
• Ondo drops tokenized asset blockchain plans for private, high-speed trading network — CoinDesk
• Wall Street veteran Don Wilson says regulators are getting perps all wrong — CoinDesk