Marathon Digital Holdings (MARA) has signed a strategic agreement with Starwood Capital Group and its data center platform, Starwood Digital Ventures (SDV), to convert and expand selected sites for enterprise, hyperscale, and AI workloads.

Under the terms of the joint venture agreement, the companies will jointly develop, finance, and operate projects across MARA’s existing portfolio.

SDV will oversee design, development, tenant sourcing, construction, and facility operations, while Starwood Capital will provide investment support at the project level. MARA will contribute sites with established energy access and infrastructure.

The partners have said that they expect to deliver around 1GW of near-term IT capacity, with a potential pathway to more than 2.5GW in the long term.

“MARA’s power-rich sites give customers what they need most: predictable access to energy at scale,” said Fred Thiel, MARA’s chairman and CEO. “Our partnership with Starwood will allow us to turn that power certainty into capacity certainty, so customers can run diverse workloads close to their data and users. This joint venture structure also gives us a more capital-efficient way to accelerate the buildout of digital infrastructure across our portfolio.”

Barry Sternlicht, chairman and CEO of Starwood Capital, added: “We are excited to partner with MARA and leverage the skill and industry expertise of our Starwood Digital Ventures platform to create significant value together. Data centers are the infrastructure responsible for driving the modern economy, and our partnership with MARA expands our opportunities to continue investing in this sector.”

The companies said they will prioritize locations with access to low-cost power, strong grid interconnection positions, and expansion potential. The facilities are expected to support both Bitcoin mining and AI workloads, which MARA claims will allow it to shift capacity in response to market conditions and customer demand.

MARA is one of the biggest Bitcoin miners in the US, predominantly utilizing stranded energy assets to power modular mining units. Last April, the company fully energized a 25MW modular cryptomine data center powered by flared natural gas in Texas and North Dakota. In December 2024, it acquired an onshore wind farm with plans to develop and operate a Bitcoin mining operation on the site, powered behind-the-meter.

Starwood is developing a range of data centers in the US market and holds a 50 percent stake in leading European data center operator Echelon Data Centres.

In July of last year, the company filed plans for a 1.2GW data center campus in Delaware, which would be developed and operated by Starwood Digital Ventures