New York, June 1, 2026, 12:02 EDT
MARA Holdings shares rose in late-morning trading on Monday, bucking a drop in bitcoin as investors weighed the miner’s shift toward power-backed artificial intelligence infrastructure rather than just coin production.
The stock was up 57 cents, or about 4%, at $14.95 after opening at $14.07 and touching an intraday high of $15.06. Volume had topped 25 million shares, while bitcoin fell about 3.4% to roughly $71,026.
That gap matters now. MARA is still tied to bitcoin mining — using large amounts of computing power to validate transactions and earn bitcoin — but the market is increasingly treating the company as a test case for whether miners can turn cheap power access into data-center capacity for AI.
The broader tape helped only partly. Wall Street’s main indexes hovered near record levels on Monday as AI optimism offset worries over the U.S.-Iran conflict and higher oil prices, with the Nasdaq modestly higher and the S&P 500 little changed.
Peers also gained. Riot Platforms rose about 4.3% to $28.28, while CleanSpark added about 3.1% to $18.87, suggesting the move was not only a MARA story, though MARA’s energy-heavy pivot gives it a different angle from many bitcoin miners.
MARA’s latest corporate push centers on Long Ridge Energy & Power, a planned $1.5 billion acquisition that would bring a 505-megawatt Ohio gas plant and more than 1,600 acres for a data-infrastructure campus. Chairman and CEO Fred Thiel said in April that “Power is the scarce input in AI,” and that owning generation, fuel supply and compute should help MARA “maximize the value of every megawatt” it controls. MARA
The company has said the Long Ridge deal would add about $144 million of annualized adjusted EBITDA, a non-GAAP profit measure that strips out interest, taxes, depreciation, amortization and some other items. It also said the site could support AI and critical IT loads — large computing workloads for artificial intelligence and other high-demand users — alongside bitcoin mining.
MARA’s balance sheet is still bitcoin-heavy. In its May 11 quarterly filing, the company said it sold about 20,880 bitcoin during the first quarter for $1.5 billion in proceeds, at an average price of $70,137, and ended March with total bitcoin holdings of 35,303. Revenue fell to $174.6 million from $213.9 million a year earlier, while net loss attributable to common stockholders widened to about $1.26 billion.
Management has framed those sales as deliberate, not a retreat from bitcoin. Chief Financial Officer Salman Khan told investors on the May earnings call that bitcoin was a “source of strategic financial flexibility,” but also said every $10,000 move in the token’s price produces about a $350 million fair-value impact on MARA’s digital assets. Roic AI
Analyst views remain split. BTIG reiterated a buy rating and $27 price target on MARA on Monday, Benzinga data showed, while MarketScreener lists Morgan Stanley’s May 19 underweight call with a $7 target and a broader 13-analyst average target of $18.17.
But the trade is not clean. A deeper bitcoin slide could hit reported earnings through mark-to-market losses, and the Long Ridge purchase still depends on regulatory approvals and closing conditions; delays, financing strain or slower tenant signings would weaken the case that MARA can convert mining power into stable AI-infrastructure cash flow.
