MARA Holdings: The Mine the Neighbors Could Hear

Where did MARA come from?

From the business of suing over patents. Marathon Patent Group was founded in Fort Lauderdale in February 2010 and made its money through a subsidiary that sued Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Apple – the model the industry calls a patent troll.^[1] On November 2, 2017 it agreed to buy a Quebec GPU-mining company and became a crypto stock; in February 2021 it renamed itself Marathon Digital Holdings – “one of the only pure-play Bitcoin investment options available,” its chairman said – and on April 26, 2021 Fred Thiel, a director, became chief executive.^[2][3][4] The company disclosed an SEC subpoena that November over a Montana coal-plant venture and a six-million-share issuance, left the coal plant in 2022 “to become carbon neutral,” restated its 2021 accounts in February 2023, and was renamed MARA Holdings on August 29, 2024; its 2025 annual report lists no SEC matter among its proceedings, and the securities class action over its accounting was dismissed with prejudice in 2026.^{[6][7][9][22][39][50]} Its principal office is in Hallandale Beach, Florida; it employed about 266 people at the end of 2025.^[39] Its largest owned region, by its own description, is Central Texas.

How did MARA come to own Granbury?

It paid for the site twice – once to build it, once to buy it. On May 24, 2021 Marathon signed a letter of intent with Compute North for a new 300-megawatt facility in Texas to host some 73,000 of its miners, and lent the builder up to $67 million over eighteen months to construct it.^[5] The site was Granbury, behind Constellation's 1,115-megawatt Wolf Hollow II gas plant in Hood County, and it began operating in the summer of 2022 with, by TIME's count, 163 containers and more than 30,000 machines.^[17] Compute North filed for bankruptcy on September 22, 2022, and MARA reported about $80 million of exposure – preferred stock, a note, and some $50 million of deposits at Granbury and King Mountain, of which it recovered most.^[8] US Bitcoin Corp operated the site from late 2022, built a 24-foot wall around about 46% of its perimeter in November 2023, and merged into Hut 8; on December 19, 2023 MARA agreed to buy Granbury and a Nebraska site, 390 megawatts in all, for $178.6 million from Generate Capital, and closed on January 12, 2024 at $189.6 million.^[24][11][39] On February 1 it announced it would take over operations from Hut 8 for a $13.5 million fee – “fully recognize the operational and economic benefits of owning these assets,” Thiel said – and on April 1 it bought Garden City, 200 megawatts in Glasscock County, from Applied Digital for $96.8 million.^[14][15][39] Its 2025 report describes Granbury at “approximately 300 megawatt,” 12.3 exahash, “among the first of our sites where we have begun integrating inference capabilities,” and its other Central Texas sites at about 250 megawatts, with a wind farm in the Panhandle it bought in February 2025 to run old rigs on power “that would have otherwise been curtailed.”^[39][27] Where Granbury sits among the state's mines is on the Texas Bitcoin mining map.

What did the neighbors hear?

Fans, from a quarter-mile away, at night. The verified petition later filed against MARA records what three residents heard and when: a sound first noticed in the spring of 2023 at “a 4 of 10,” worsening through the fall and winter to 9 or 10, with phone readings of 88 decibels at 4:58 in the morning; one of them began calling the constable, the sheriff, and her commissioner in December 2023, and the press in February.^[24] TIME reported in February 2024 on a reading of 103 decibels and MARA's statement that it had been unaware of the noise at purchase and had commissioned a study; DL News that month quoted the company's spokesman: “I'm not aware of anyone ever having medical issues from a Bitcoin mining site,” and “There are people who are upset by this, and we need to go fix it.”^[12][13] On July 8, 2024 TIME published “We're Living in a Nightmare”: more than forty residents interviewed, 72 decibels measured in a child's bedroom, a 77-year-old retired pastor with heart failure and a pacemaker, two ear specialists describing patients, and a constable who had recorded more than 85 decibels over thirty-five times that year and written $17,500 in citations under the Penal Code's disorderly-conduct provision, which presumes noise above 85 unreasonable after an officer's warning and caps each fine at $500. The story also reported that MARA's December 2023 purchase agreement “clearly mentions the existence of the $1.9 million ‘sound wall,’” beside the company's line: “Prior to the purchase, we were not aware of the noise issues.”^[17] “Nobody in their right mind would live here,” Cheryl Shadden told the Tribune two days later. “My windows rattle.”^[18] On July 11 a Hood County jury acquitted MARA's site manager, David Fischer, on twelve of the citations; the county attorney said jurors “had trouble connecting it to Fischer personally.”^[19] On July 23 the commissioners court passed a resolution asking the Legislature to make noise a statutory nuisance, to allow escalating penalties, and to reintroduce Kolkhorst's SB 1751, with copies to the county's senator and representative. Texas counties cannot pass noise ordinances; the Legislature did nothing with the request in 2025.^[20][34] The senator whose bill the county wanted back is on Lois Kolkhorst and Bitcoin.

What did MARA do, and what did the neighbors do?

MARA turned things off and built things up; the neighbors sued, and then tried to become a city. By the company's own survey of July 18, 2024, all eleven measured points were below 63 decibels, down from 78 before it took over; it reported 70 to 90 air-cooled containers deactivated by July and more than a hundred by December, immersion cooling rising from 20% to 50%, a sound wall begun in August and finished in October, and trees planted in November – “well below the state and county law sound limit of 85 decibels.”^[21] By October 2025 the Tribune counted 95 containers off, a wall 2,000 feet long, and 67% of the site in oil, and a county-funded study found about 60 decibels at the fence and 35 to 53 in the neighborhoods.^[34] On October 4, 2024 the Citizens Concerned About Wolf Hollow – an association of more than two dozen residents founded that year by Shadden – filed a verified petition in Hood County district court, represented by Earthjustice, for a single cause of private nuisance and a single remedy: a permanent injunction against “any unreasonable noise and vibrations,” with no money damages, a jury demanded. The petition describes homes “turning their refuge into a prison” and a partial wall that “actually causes the sound to be amplified.”^[24] “No corporation has the right to subject their neighbors to conditions that jeopardize their health and well-being,” Earthjustice's Rebecca Ramirez said; Shadden: “Day and night, we are subjected to relentless noise that is physically harming us.”^[25] MARA removed the case to federal court on diversity grounds; the court remanded it on March 27, 2025; MARA's motion to dismiss was denied that summer, and on September 3, 2025 the plaintiffs moved to compel its equipment lists, mitigation records, and noise data.^[29][33] Then the city. About 600 residents petitioned to incorporate two square miles around the mine as Mitchell Bend – a city could pass the noise ordinance the county could not; on October 29, 2025 MARA sued Hood County, its judge, its attorney, and its elections administrator, calling the vote “an intentional and unconstitutional use of local government authority to favor a small group of citizens” that “seeks only to target specific businesses – including MARA – with punitive taxes and restrictive ordinances.”^[32][35] Judge Reed O'Connor denied a restraining order on November 3 – no “substantial threat of irreparable harm” – and Shadden said, “We just want to sleep in our beds in peace at night.”^[36] On November 4 the incorporation failed, 86 votes to 52. MARA: voters “saw through the sham incorporation effort and rejected it at the ballot box.” Thomas Weeks, a plaintiff: “What we want to do is get back and preserve the peace we had, it's that simple.”^[37] On May 1, 2026 nine property owners living from a hundredth of a mile to nine-tenths of a mile from the fence filed a second federal suit, for nuisance, negligence, and emotional distress, seeking up to $10 million; MARA: “We are committed to being thoughtful and considerate members of our new community.”^[43] Its 2025 annual report, filed in March 2026, lists none of the Granbury cases among its legal proceedings.^[39]

What is MARA's record with the grid and the state?

Curtailment without compensation, by its own account, and politics at arm's length. When Kolkhorst's brake on the miners passed the Senate in April 2023, Thiel told Decrypt it “won't change our minds about Texas” and that “I don't think it's going to make it out of the House intact” – the House being “much more aligned with the positive aspects and the benefits of bitcoin mining.” It did not.^[10] A company representative said then that MARA “voluntarily curtails operations to support the grid” with revenue that was “immaterial,” and its 2025 annual report keeps the line: “Although we do not receive significant compensation for curtailment, the dispatchable load of our Bitcoin mining operations helps balance the grid,” at an average energy cost of four cents per kilowatt-hour at owned sites.^[39]In Winter Storm Fern in January 2026 it “voluntarily curtailed approximately 550 MW” in ERCOT, out of the 4,100 the operator reported mines shedding.^[47] The company is among the Texas Blockchain Council's largest funders; no testimony by it on SB 1751 or SB 6 has been located, nor any Texas lobbyist registration.^[49] On the state's reserve Thiel has been arch rather than opposed – a reserve is “an empty statement unless you start putting stuff into it,” he said of the federal one, suggesting the government mine its own.^[31] When the Governor ordered his audit of the queue in August 2026 MARA committed to his standards within a week – “These are not new commitments we are making in response to this review” – and Thiel told analysts the audit would flush out phantom requests to his company's benefit; ERCOT's Batch Zero then classed Granbury's 280 megawatts and Garden City's 200 as base load and the two gigawatts MARA signed for in Matagorda County on July 9 – a gigawatt by October 2027, two by April 2028, up to $600 million contingent on approval – as studied.^[47][45][48] The operator that counts those megawatts is on ERCOT and Bitcoin; the regulator running the audit is on the Public Utility Commission and Bitcoin.

What are the numbers?

Large, and moving both ways. MARA's energized hashrate went from 7 exahash at the end of 2022 to 24.7, 53.2, and 66.4 at the ends of the next three years, and 70.3 in mid-2026 – about eight percent of the network.^[28][39][46] Its treasury went the other way. In November 2024 it adopted a full-hold policy and sold $1 billion of zero-coupon convertible notes, then $850 million more, to buy bitcoin, reaching 44,893 coins at the end of 2024 and 53,822, worth $4.7 billion, at the end of 2025.^[26][28][39] In March 2026 it sold 15,133 of them to buy back a billion dollars of those notes at a discount – “we captured approximately $88 million in value,” Thiel said – and by June 30 held 35,577, about $2.1 billion, having sold some $1.5 billion of bitcoin in six months as it turned toward AI infrastructure: “a redefining quarter, not an incremental one.”^[40][46][44] In April it agreed to buy Long Ridge Energy, a 505-megawatt gas plant in Ohio, for about $1.5 billion including assumed debt – the strategy Thiel had stated in November 2025: “By 2028, you'll either be a power generator, be owned by one, or be partnered with one.”^[42][38] The income statement follows the bitcoin price through the fair-value rule: a net loss of $687 million in 2022, income of $261 million in 2023 and $541 million in 2024, a loss of $1.31 billion in 2025 on revenue of $907 million, and a loss of $611 million in the second quarter of 2026.^[28][39][46] Shares outstanding went from 82 million at the end of 2020 to 386 million in July 2026.^[46] Thiel was paid about $43 million for 2024, with performance units at their 200% maximum, and about $27 million for 2025, including $4.3 million of personal security.^[30][41] The miner whose numbers make the closest comparison is on Riot Platforms and Texas.

The honest counterweight: the wall in the contract, the readings, and the ledger

Three things, and the first is a document. MARA's purchase agreement of December 2023 named a $1.9 million sound wall; MARA's statement of January 2024 was that it had not known about the noise. Both are in TIME's reporting, and the page leaves them side by side.^[17] Second, the readings, which cut the other way. Every number MARA has published since it took over is below the state's 85-decibel line, and the county's own study put the fence at about 60 and the neighborhoods in the 35-to-53 range – ordinary suburban sound levels – after 95 containers were shut, two-thirds of the site went to immersion, and the wall reached 2,000 feet.^[21][34] The jury that heard the citations acquitted the man charged; the federal judge who heard MARA's case against the election found no irreparable harm to MARA, and the voters found no majority for the city. The neighbors' case is that a mine audible at a quarter-mile at four in the morning is a nuisance whatever the meter says, and no court has yet ruled on it; the nuisance suit has survived dismissal and is in discovery, the damages suit is new, and MARA's annual report treats all of it as immaterial. Third, the ledger. The company's profits are the bitcoin price's; its treasury was built with borrowed money and sold down a third when the price fell; its shares have been multiplied nearly five-fold; its chief executive's pay in two years exceeds seventy million dollars; and the Granbury mine, at 12.3 of its 70 exahash, is a fraction of a company whose future, on its own telling, is gas plants and data centers rather than fans.^[39][46][41] Two things this page does not say: Riot's Rockdale is not MARA's, and the Constellation peaker proposed next to the mine is Constellation's, barred by its own account from serving the mine.^[23]

The fair reading is that MARA inherited a noise problem it had financed, fixed it to the standard the law sets, and has not fixed it to the standard the neighbors live by – and that the gap between those two standards is what a Hood County jury will eventually be asked to measure. Until then the mine runs, the wall stands, and the company has already decided it would rather own a power plant.

Where does MARA stand today?

As of September 2026: about 300 megawatts at Granbury and 200 at Garden City classed as base load, two gigawatts in Matagorda County classed as studied, a gas plant in Ohio awaiting closing, 35,577 bitcoin, 70 exahash, a state nuisance suit in discovery with no trial date, a federal damages suit four months old, a $138.8 million contract verdict on appeal, and a chief executive who says the miner that survives 2028 will be a power company.^{[48][45][42][46][33][43][39][38]} The other company in the wing is on Riot Platforms and Texas; the county's senator is on Lois Kolkhorst and Bitcoin; the sites are on the Texas Bitcoin mining map. This page is the mine the neighbors could hear, and what has been done about it in two years by everyone but the Legislature.