MARA shares surge after 2 GW Texas infrastructure deal expands AI ambitions

Bitcoin miner MARA Holdings shares rose about 15% in early trading Thursday after the company announced plans to acquire a Texas powered-land site with access to up to 2 gigawatts of electricity for AI computing and Bitcoin mining.

The 1,200-acre site in Matagorda county, about 90 miles southwest of Houston, is expected to provide access to an initial 1 GW of grid capacity by October 2027 and up to 2 GW by April 2028. MARA said it plans to develop the site as a digital infrastructure campus supporting both high-performance computing and Bitcoin mining.

Upon full energization, the site is expected to more than double the Bitcoin (BTC) miner's potential power capacity to about 4.8 GW. HIF USA will retain a minority ownership stake in the project if MARA signs a lease with a high-performance computing tenant, according to the companies. The companies did not disclose financial terms of the transaction.

Source: Yahoo Finance

In a post on X, MARA said the project remains in the early stages of development and is subject to regulatory approvals, adding that construction will be phased over several years.

In April, MARA announced it would acquire Long Ridge Energy & Power, adding a 505-megawatt gas-fired power plant and a co-located data center in Ohio, in a roughly $1.5 billion transaction. Earlier this year, the company acquired a 64% stake in French computing infrastructure operator Exaion.

MARA is the fourth-largest publicly traded corporate holder of Bitcoin (BTC), with 36,303 BTC, according to data from BitcoinTreasuries.NET.

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BTC miners bet big on AI data centers

Bitcoin miners have increasingly expanded into AI and high-performance computing as demand for data center capacity has grown. Rather than repurposing mining hardware, companies are leveraging existing power infrastructure built to support BTC mining, including grid connections, substations and energized sites.

However, converting mining sites into AI-ready data centers requires significant investment. CoinShares estimates mining infrastructure typically costs $700,000 to $1 million/MW, compared with $8 million to $15 million/MW for liquid-cooled AI infrastructure, while hyperscale customers require higher power density and uptime than many mining facilities were designed to provide.

Even so, several publicly traded miners have announced multibillion-dollar AI infrastructure agreements in recent months. Core Scientific expanded its hosting agreement with CoreWeave to more than $10 billion, while Hut 8 signed a 15-year, $7 billion data center lease with Fluidstack. TeraWulf has reported billions of dollars in contracted HPC revenue.

Investors have broadly rewarded the strategy. Hut 8 shares jumped about 20% after announcing its Fluidstack agreement, while companies with AI and HPC contracts have traded at higher valuation multiples than miners focused solely on Bitcoin production, according to a report from CoinShares.

Last week, TeraWulf shares rose about 12% after the Bitcoin miner announced a 20-year AI data center lease with Anthropic, expected to generate roughly $19 billion in contract revenue.

MARA is the sixth-largest holding in the sector exchange-traded fund CoinShares Bitcoin Mining ETF, as 4.76% of assets, according to Yahoo Finance data. WGMI shares were up more than 5% in early afternoon trading on Thursday.

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