New York, May 21, 2026, 08:07 (EDT)
MARA Holdings shares edged lower before Thursday’s open, pausing after a 5.7% jump in the prior session as investors weighed fresh insider filings against the bitcoin miner’s push into power-backed AI infrastructure. The stock closed Wednesday at $13.15 and was indicated at $13.10 in pre-market trading at 8:02 a.m. EDT.
The timing matters because MARA is no longer being priced only as a bitcoin-mining trade. Bitcoin mining — using large amounts of computing power to validate blockchain transactions and earn coins — still drives the company’s volatility, but the newer story is whether MARA can turn access to cheap or controlled power into high-performance computing, or large-scale data processing for AI workloads.
Bitcoin was trading near $77,162, down fractionally, while peers Riot Platforms and CleanSpark were also coming off gains, underscoring that the broader miner group remains tied to crypto appetite and power costs.
The freshest company-side filings came after the close. MARA’s May 20 Form 4 reports showed Chief Executive Fred Thiel sold 27,505 shares at $12 each, while Chief Financial Officer Salman Khan sold 16,000 shares at $12 through a family trust. Both filings said the sales were made under Rule 10b5-1 plans, pre-arranged trading plans that let executives schedule trades in advance.
Those sales were small next to the bigger issue in the stock: MARA’s April agreement to buy Long Ridge Energy & Power for about $1.5 billion including assumed debt. The deal would give MARA a 505-megawatt natural gas plant in Hannibal, Ohio, and more than 1,600 acres of land for a data-center campus.
“Power is the scarce input in AI,” Thiel said when MARA announced the deal, adding that Long Ridge would give the company control of power, land, water access, fuel supply and grid interconnection in one site. MARA
In an interview with Reuters, Thiel called the asset an “ideal data center campus” and said MARA had drawn interest from potential hyperscaler tenants, meaning large cloud-computing customers that lease big blocks of data-center capacity. Reuters
Rosenblatt analyst Chris Brendler has taken the bullish side of that debate. He raised his price target on MARA to $15 from $11 and kept a Buy rating, saying Long Ridge “represents another major step forward” away from a pure-play bitcoin miner and toward an energy-backed digital infrastructure platform. TipRanks
MARA has also moved to clear a debt-related hurdle around the Long Ridge transaction. On May 15, the company said it had received the required consents from noteholders tied to Long Ridge’s 8.750% senior secured notes due 2032; the transaction is expected to close in the second half of 2026, possibly as soon as the third quarter, subject to approvals including from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.
The balance sheet explains why investors are sensitive to the pivot. In its first-quarter filing, MARA said revenue fell about 18% to $174.6 million, while net loss attributable to common stockholders was about $1.26 billion, or $3.31 per share. The company mined 2,247 bitcoin in the quarter, down slightly from a year earlier.
MARA also said it held 35,303 bitcoin as of March 31 and sold about 20,880 bitcoin during the quarter for $1.5 billion in proceeds. That keeps bitcoin as both a liquidity source and a risk: the company said it may monetize holdings from time to time, depending on market conditions and capital needs.
But the trade can still go wrong. Long Ridge needs regulatory approval, tenants, construction execution and capital, while a fresh fall in bitcoin could again hit earnings and liquidity. Analyst views are split: S&P Global-tracked targets cited by StockAnalysis range from $7 to $30, a wide spread that shows the market is still arguing over whether MARA is an AI-power platform or a volatile miner with a new story.
