MARA Swaps E-Fuel Dreams for 2 Gigawatts of Compute, and the Stock Says Thanks 🏗️

MARA Holdings said Thursday it will acquire a 1,200-acre powered-land site in Matagorda County, Texas — about 90 miles southwest of Houston — from synthetic-fuels developer HIF USA, in a deal valued at up to $600 million if staged milestones are met. The Miami-based Bitcoin ($BTC) miner plans to develop the site alongside Starwood Digital Ventures into a digital infrastructure campus housing both AI data centers and Bitcoin mining operations, with access to an initial 1 gigawatt of grid capacity by October 2027 and up to 2 gigawatts by April 2028, subject to ERCOT approval. The acquisition hands MARA a fully permitted, pre-approved grid connection tied to a project that was once pitched by HIF as the first large e-fuels plant in the United States, an approximately $7 billion initiative backed by Texas Governor Greg Abbott to produce cleaner shipping fuel. HIF will retain a minority stake once a high-performance computing tenant signs a lease, and the company said it will continue pursuing other fuel projects in Texas and abroad.

Shares in MARA were up more than 15% on the day at a recent $13.87, per Yahoo Finance, extending the stock's 2026 gain above 54% and lifting its monthly rise past 4%. At the full 2 gigawatts, the $600 million price implies roughly $300,000 per megawatt of grid access, though the staged structure limits near-term cash outlay, with most payments tied to regulatory and leasing milestones. The site, once fully energized, would lift MARA's total power portfolio to about 4.8 gigawatts, including the previously announced roughly $1.5 billion acquisition of the 505-megawatt Long Ridge gas-fired power plant in Ohio and an earlier 64% stake in French computing infrastructure operator Exaion.

"This transaction advances our strategy of securing strategically located infrastructure assets capable of supporting high-performance compute and Bitcoin workloads," said MARA Chairman and CEO Fred Thiel. "As demand for digital infrastructure continues to grow, we believe sites with access to reliable, scalable power will become increasingly valuable. This acquisition meaningfully expands our long-term development pipeline and strengthens our ability to support high-performance compute and maximize the value of that power over time." Thiel framed the broader push in an April filing, saying, "Power is the scarce input in AI… we are building a differentiated platform designed to maximize the value of every megawatt we control."

The deal lands as ERCOT's grid interconnection queue has swelled by nearly 300% over the past year, with data centers driving most new requests, according to the grid operator. That supply squeeze has pulled Bitcoin miners into the AI infrastructure race: Core Scientific expanded its CoreWeave hosting agreement to more than $10 billion, Hut 8 signed a 15-year, $7 billion data center lease with Fluidstack, and TeraWulf has reported billions of dollars in contracted HPC revenue. Mining infrastructure typically costs $700,000 to $1 million per megawatt, CoinShares estimates, compared with $8 million to $15 million per megawatt for liquid-cooled AI facilities. MARA ranks as the fourth-largest publicly traded corporate holder of $BTC, with 36,303 $BTC, according to BitcoinTreasuries.NET, while $BTC itself held in the low $60,000s after briefly touching 21-month lows under $58,000 last week, with $ETH below $1,750.