NEW YORK, April 9, 2026, 5:28 PM EDT
MARA Holdings, Inc. shares climbed Thursday, shrugging off a price target trim from Cantor Fitzgerald, which lowered its call to $10 from $11 but stuck with the Overweight rating—still looking for outperformance. Investors appeared undeterred, signaling continued support for the company’s push to broaden its reputation beyond just bitcoin mining.
The scramble is on for crypto miners to convert their energy-guzzling operations to artificial intelligence and high-performance computing, or HPC, as mining profits swing wildly. Riot Platforms isn’t immune—activist investor Starboard Value pushed the company back in February to pick up the pace on AI data-center agreements.
MARA last traded at $9.67, a 1.7% lift after reaching $10.01 earlier. Riot advanced 3.5%, CleanSpark added 3.3%, and bitcoin hovered close to $72,273—crypto-equities stayed in the spotlight.
According to Cantor analyst Brett Knoblauch, AI infrastructure stands out as “an attractive place to invest”—the appeal, he noted, is that backers aren’t forced to pick a winning AI app or model to profit from the growth. He sees supply and demand remaining mismatched for at least another five years, which he thinks could help support prices. TipRanks
MARA doubled down on its case March 26, announcing the sale of 15,133 bitcoin that brought in about $1.1 billion, alongside a deal to buy back nearly $1.0 billion principal of its 2030 and 2031 convertible notes—debt eligible for conversion to equity—at roughly a 9% discount. The company put the reduction in outstanding convertible debt at about 30%, taking it down to around $2.3 billion.
Chief Executive Fred Thiel said selling bitcoin would “strengthen our balance sheet” while giving MARA more “strategic optionality” as it looks past pure-play mining. In a shareholder letter from February, the company noted it had already begun offloading bitcoin in the back half of 2025 to cover operating costs, and plans to keep selectively monetizing its holdings through this year. MARA
MARA’s wider strategy started to crystallize in late February, when the company struck a deal with Starwood Capital and Starwood Digital Ventures. The goal: convert and build out specific sites for enterprise, cloud, and AI clients. Both sides pegged the platform’s immediate IT capacity at around 1 gigawatt, with a potential runway to 2.5 gigawatts or more.
In a letter to shareholders, MARA disclosed it picked up a 64% stake in Exaion, a French firm specializing in secure cloud and AI infrastructure. The move broadens MARA’s footprint into European HPC services, part of its efforts to diversify revenue beyond mining. The parties announced earlier in the month that the Exaion deal had met all closing conditions.
The pivot remains unproven. MARA’s fourth-quarter revenue slipped 6% to $202.3 million, while the company reported a hefty $1.7 billion net loss—$1.5 billion of that was a fair-value loss from a markdown on its digital assets. In 2024, Reuters highlighted that a lot of mining facilities could face steep rebuilding costs and would require specialized cooling to run AI workloads. CleanSpark’s CEO Zach Bradford didn’t mince words, saying some miners chasing AI “don’t really know what they’re getting into.” MARA
The divergence among competitors is sharpening. Riot faces mounting pressure to ramp up AI agreements, whereas CleanSpark remains focused on mining, maintaining that the shift isn’t as simple as it’s made out to be. That puts MARA in the position of having to persuade investors it can leverage its energy resources for a more consistent infrastructure play—without forfeiting the bitcoin upside.
