NEW YORK, May 28, 2026, 14:02 (EDT)
MARA Holdings shares slipped Thursday afternoon, lagging other bitcoin miners. The latest slide in bitcoin put the focus back on MARA’s large bitcoin holdings.
MARA fell 2.1% to $14.03 with volume above 26 million shares. Bitcoin dropped 1.7% to $73,437. Riot Platforms gained 3.9% and CleanSpark was up 0.6%. MARA lagged its peers in the group.
MARA has been pitching itself as more than a leveraged bitcoin-mining play, but the market isn’t fully buying it. When bitcoin drops, MARA shares keep trading like a crypto proxy anyway.
Stocks were choppy in broader markets. The Nasdaq Composite edged up 0.21% and the S&P 500 added 0.24%, rebounding after dipping earlier on U.S.-Iran worries and mixed U.S. data. Bitcoin and ether dropped as investors pulled away from risk, according to Reuters. Reuters
MARA didn’t put out any new company releases for two sessions. The last post on its investor-relations page was May 15, about Long Ridge Energy debt consents. Thursday’s move in the stock looked tied to crypto and positioning, not a new statement. MARA
Earlier news from the company is still driving the trade. MARA said in April it would buy Long Ridge Energy & Power for roughly $1.5 billion, debt included, in a move aimed at expanding beyond bitcoin mining into energy-based data centers and AI infrastructure. According to Reuters, the deal includes a 505-megawatt gas power plant in Ohio, along with land for a data center campus. Reuters
Marathon Digital CEO Fred Thiel didn’t mince words when the company announced the Long Ridge deal. “Power is the scarce input in AI,” Thiel said, and he wants the company to “maximize the value of every megawatt we control.” High-performance computing, or HPC — which covers the large-scale computing needed by AI and other data-hungry applications — has moved to the center of MARA’s pitch to investors. MARA
Bitcoin is still a key factor. MARA’s quarterly filing listed revenue at $174.6 million for the three months ended March 31, off roughly 18% from last year, with most of that drop tied to lower bitcoin-mining revenue. The filing also reported a net loss of $1.26 billion for the quarter. MARA
MARA spelled out the impact of bitcoin moves. The company said a $10,000 swing in bitcoin’s market price would have altered its first-quarter loss before income taxes by about $353 million. That’s a type of exposure investors watch whenever bitcoin falls. MARA
MARA has a balance-sheet angle here too. In March, the company sold 15,133 bitcoin for about $1.1 billion and used some of that money to buy back convertible notes, a kind of debt that can turn into shares and dilute holders. Thiel called the sale a “strategic capital allocation move” to help shore up the balance sheet while MARA pushes into areas beyond mining. MARA
Execution is the main risk. Long Ridge has to get regulatory approvals like one from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. The AI data center won’t move forward unless power, tenants, financing and timing all come together. If bitcoin drops further, it could slow things down even more, before the new infrastructure business has shown that it can help offset crypto swings.
