rewrite this title MARA Stock Pops as Bitcoin Miner Agrees to Acquire Massive Powered Texas Land Plot – Decrypt

MARA Holdings, the publicly traded Bitcoin-mining giant, is deepening its bet that America’s power grid—not the cryptocurrency itself—is the real asset worth owning. And its stock is flying Thursday following the announcement.

The Miami-based company announced Thursday that it has struck a deal with HIF USA, a synthetic-fuels developer, to acquire a sprawling piece of land in Matagorda County, Texas, about 90 miles southwest of Houston. The site, spanning more than 1,200 acres, comes with access to significant electrical grid capacity: up to 1 gigawatt by October 2027, and as much as 2 gigawatts the following spring.

MARA plans to turn the property into a computing campus, developed alongside Starwood Digital Ventures, that could house both AI data centers and the energy-hungry machines that mine Bitcoin. HIF, which had been eyeing the site for its own fuel-production plans, will keep a minority stake once a computing tenant signs a lease, and says it will continue pursuing its other fuel projects elsewhere in Texas and abroad.

Shares in MARA are up more than 15% on the day at a recent price of $13.87, per Yahoo Finance, pushing the firm’s monthly gain above 4%. So far in 2026, MARA shares are up more than 54% on the back of sizable AI compute demand and the resulting hype from investors.



The transaction is the latest sign of an unusual convergence reshaping the power industry: companies once known purely for mining Bitcoin are transforming into infrastructure developers, chasing the same scarce electrons that AI companies desperately need.

MARA said the deal, once fully built out, would help push its total power portfolio to nearly 4.8 gigawatts—including a previously announced acquisition of an Ohio power plant—a scale that rivals some regional utilities.

“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, in a statement. “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.”

For Matagorda County, a rural stretch of the Texas Gulf Coast, the promise is more concrete: thousands of construction and permanent jobs, company officials said, as MARA adds to the more than $1.2 billion it says it has already invested in the state.