In brief
- MARA will convert select mining sites into AI-focused campuses.
- Shares rose as much as 16% before dipping slightly in after-hours trading following the announcement.
- Analysts say MARA remains a Bitcoin proxy until leases are signed.
MARA Holdings, one of the largest publicly traded Bitcoin miners in the U.S., said Thursday it will team up with Starwood Property Trust to develop AI-focused data centers, sending its shares higher in after-hours trading.
Under the agreement, MARA will work with Starwood to convert a portfolio of its U.S. Bitcoin mining sites, excluding those already held in third-party joint ventures, into hyperscale data center campuses, with projects structured on a site-by-site basis.
The partnership will allow the two to turn select Bitcoin mining sites into large-scale data centers that could also serve enterprise and AI workloads, transforming “power certainty into capacity certainty," Fred Thiel, chairman and CEO of MARA, said in a statement.
MARA closed at $8.45 on Thursday, down 1.4% in the U.S trading session, before inching higher to $9.62 in after-hours, a gain of about 13.9%, according to Google Finance data. Shares reached as high as $9.9 in extended trading, up roughly 16% from the regular-session’s close.
MARA said the partnership targets sites with low-cost power and strong grid access, positioning them to support both Bitcoin mining and AI workloads.
By pairing its energy-heavy infrastructure with Starwood’s development and operating capabilities, the company aims to scale the campuses into digital infrastructure that can shift compute between mining and AI, depending on pricing and demand.
The move is “strategically meaningful because it moves MARA from a “hashrate and Bitcoin price beta” toward “power-to-compute monetization,” Ram Kumar, core contributor at AI and blockchain infrastructure firm OpenLedger, told Decrypt.
“That said, until there are signed hyperscale/enterprise leases with disclosed economics, MARA will still trade primarily as a Bitcoin price proxy, because mining remains the cleanest, most observable driver of near-term cash flows, while data center conversion is execution-heavy and timeline-dependent,” Kumar said.
Meaningful changes
The move could meaningfully shift MARA’s long-term earnings profile, but it remains dependent on future AI expenditure curves, Siwon Huh, researcher at crypto analytics firm Four Pillars, told Decrypt.
“The lack of immediate AI revenue suggests that the short-term impact will be limited,” he said, noting that, unlike Core Scientific, which secured AI contracts last year, or TeraWulf, which has signed long-term hosting deals, MARA is still at the partnership stage and has not announced confirmed AI tenants.
MARA can elect to hold between 10% and 50% equity in each joint venture, while Starwood will act as managing member and lead development, tenant sourcing, and financing efforts.
“Without signed tenant agreements, it is premature to discuss a fundamental shift in their earnings profile,” Huh said. One decisive catalyst that could come into play would be “a binding, long-term lease agreement with a hyperscale-tier tenant,” he added.
For MARA to generate meaningful AI revenue, its strategies for GPU procurement and power allocation need to be finalized.
“Clear guidance on the power distribution ratio between Bitcoin mining and AI compute is essential for investors to accurately model the demand for both segments,” Huh said.
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