MARA gains 14% on $600M Texas AI and Bitcoin mining campus

MARA buys a Texas site with up to 2 GW of grid capacity, turning a former fuel plant into a flexible hub for Bitcoin mining and AI.

MARA jumped 14% on July 9 after a $600 million deal for a Texas site with up to 2,000 megawatts, turning a former fuel plant into a Bitcoin and AI hub.

"Power is the scarce input in AI," Fred Thiel, chairman and chief executive officer of MARA, said in an April filing. "We are building a differentiated platform designed to maximize the value of every megawatt we control."

The site in Matagorda County, about 145 km southwest of Houston, was purchased from low-carbon fuel developer HIF Global in a deal that closed July 2 via MARA's subsidiary Volt Texas LLC. MARA will make staged payments tied to regulatory approvals, land purchase, power delivery and a data center lease with a third-party tenant. HIF will retain a minority stake after the lease is signed. MARA expects access to an initial 1 GW of capacity by October 2027 and up to 2 GW by April 2028, subject to ERCOT approval. Construction is planned for this year.

The acquisition is the latest in a string of MARA infrastructure deals that could push its total portfolio power capacity to roughly 4.8 GW, including a pending $1.5 billion purchase of a 505 MW gas-fired plant in Ohio and a partnership with Starwood Capital Group targeting up to 2.5 GW of AI capacity. The bet hinges on whether MARA can convert that power into signed tenant revenue as the industry faces hashprice pressure at $29.6 per PH/s per day — 6% below the all-time low recorded in February.

Flexible Mining Beats Fixed Load

Bitcoin miners have a structural advantage over traditional data center operators: their machines can power down in seconds. That lets MARA mine Bitcoin when hashprice is favorable and sell power to AI tenants the rest of the time. At the full 2 GW buildout, the $600 million price tag works out to about $300,000 per megawatt of grid access — a fraction of the cost of building new transmission capacity in an ERCOT interconnection queue that has grown almost 300% over the past year, according to the grid operator.

Rival Miners Copy the Playbook

MARA is not alone in the pivot. Riot Platforms has sold Bitcoin to fund its own data center conversion, and Bitcoin mining stocks now trade in close correlation with AI sentiment. Cipher Digital, formerly Cipher Mining, has signed a 15-year, 300 MW lease with Amazon Web Services and a 10-year, 300 MW agreement with Fluidstack and Google. Bitdeer is building a $36 million manufacturing plant in Sparks, Nevada, for its own SEALMINER rigs while expanding its AI Cloud division, which reported $69 million in recognized revenue in April.

The industry-wide shift reflects a simple math problem: at a hashprice of $29.6 per PH/s per day, mining alone no longer justifies the cost of securing large power blocks. Pairing mining with AI hosting provides a revenue hedge against Bitcoin's volatility while monetizing the same infrastructure. MARA's potential 4.8 GW portfolio would make it one of the largest private power holders in the US data center market, competing directly with traditional developers like Digital Realty and Equinix.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.