MARA shares jump after Texas power-site deal

MARA Holdings shares rose Thursday after the Bitcoin miner said it agreed to acquire a large powered site in Texas, a deal that gives the company something investors are watching closely: access to electricity. For crypto miners and AI data centers, power supply can decide how much computing capacity a company can actually bring online.

The Miami-based company said it reached an agreement with HIF USA, a synthetic-fuels developer, to buy a site of more than 1,200 acres in Matagorda County, Texas. The property is about 90 miles southwest of Houston, according to MARA.

MARA said the site can access up to 1 gigawatt of grid capacity by October 2027 and as much as 2 gigawatts by April 2028. A gigawatt is 1,000 megawatts, enough to represent a major electricity allocation for industrial-scale computing.

The company plans to develop the land into a computing campus with Starwood Digital Ventures. MARA said the campus could support both artificial intelligence and high-performance computing, a term for heavy-duty processing used for large technical workloads, as well as Bitcoin mining.

Why power is the asset investors are watching

Bitcoin mining uses specialized machines to secure the Bitcoin network and compete for newly issued coins. Those machines consume large amounts of electricity, so miners with cheaper or more reliable power can have an operating edge.

AI data centers have created another source of demand for the same thing: large, dependable power connections. That has pushed some Bitcoin miners to present themselves less as pure crypto companies and more as digital infrastructure businesses that can serve multiple computing markets.

MARA’s deal fits that shift. The company said that, once the Texas site is fully developed, its total power portfolio would rise to nearly 4.8 gigawatts. That figure includes a previously announced acquisition of an Ohio power plant, according to MARA.

HIF USA will retain a minority stake in the Texas site after a computing tenant signs a lease, MARA said. HIF also said it will continue working on its fuel projects in other parts of Texas and internationally.

The stock reaction

MARA shares were up more than 15% Thursday at a recent price of $13.87, according to Yahoo Finance. The move lifted the stock’s monthly gain above 4%, and shares were up more than 54% so far in 2026, according to the same data.

In a company statement, MARA Chairman and CEO Fred Thiel said the transaction supports the company’s plan to secure infrastructure that can handle high-performance computing and Bitcoin workloads. He said sites with reliable and expandable power access should become more valuable as demand for digital infrastructure grows.

For Matagorda County, MARA said the project is expected to create thousands of construction and permanent jobs. The company also said the project would add to more than $1.2 billion it has already invested in Texas.

The deal underscores how the business model for some public Bitcoin miners is changing. Their stocks can still move with crypto prices, but investors are also increasingly focused on whether these companies control the power and land needed to host the next wave of computing demand.

This story draws on original reporting from Decrypt.