MARA Holdings shares climbed about 15% Thursday after the Bitcoin miner agreed to acquire a Texas site with access to up to 2 gigawatts of power for AI computing and mining. The deal would more than double MARA's potential power capacity to about 4.8 GW, extending a wave of miners pivoting toward high-performance computing.
Shares of Bitcoin miner MARA Holdings rose about 15% in early trading Thursday after the company said it would 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 an initial 1 GW of grid capacity by October 2027 and up to 2 GW by April 2028. MARA plans to develop it as a digital infrastructure campus supporting both high-performance computing and Bitcoin mining.
A deal that doubles MARA's power capacity
Once fully energized, the site is expected to more than double MARA's potential power capacity to about 4.8 GW. HIF USA will keep a minority ownership stake if MARA signs a lease with a high-performance computing tenant. The companies did not disclose financial terms.
In a post on X, MARA said the project remains early in development and is subject to regulatory approvals, with construction phased over several years. The move builds on recent expansion: in April the company agreed to acquire Long Ridge Energy & Power, adding a 505-megawatt gas-fired plant and a co-located data center in Ohio in a roughly $1.5 billion transaction, and earlier this year it took a 64% stake in French operator Exaion. MARA is the fourth-largest publicly traded corporate holder of Bitcoin, with 36,303 BTC, according to BitcoinTreasuries.NET.
Miners bet big on AI infrastructure
Bitcoin miners have increasingly moved into AI and high-performance computing as demand for data center capacity has grown, leaning on power infrastructure — grid connections, substations and energized sites — already built for mining. Converting those sites is costly, however. CoinShares estimates mining infrastructure costs $700,000 to $1 million/MW versus $8 million to $15 million/MW for liquid-cooled AI infrastructure.
Even so, several miners have signed large deals. Core Scientific expanded its CoreWeave hosting agreement to more than $10 billion, while Hut 8 signed a 15-year, $7 billion data center lease with Fluidstack. Investors have broadly rewarded the strategy: Hut 8 shares jumped about 20% after announcing that agreement.
Last week, TeraWulf shares rose about 12% after the miner announced a 20-year AI data center lease with Anthropic, expected to generate roughly $19 billion in contract revenue.
Source: Cointelegraph
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