MARA Holdings (MARA) is making a astonishment pivot from its bitcoin (BTC) mining roots, announcing precocious Monday that it volition get a 64% involvement successful Exaion, a high-performance computing (HPC) subsidiary of French vigor elephantine EDF, broker H.C. Wainwright said successful a probe study Tuesday.
While MARA has agelong floated the thought of helping powerfulness companies equilibrium grid loads, H.C. Wainwright expert Kevin Dede said helium expected that to stay wrong a mining-centric strategy, not a nonstop plunge into HPC buildouts.
But with bitcoin halving events looming successful 2028 and 2032, and artificial quality (AI) request driving premium returns connected compute power, MARA is betting HPC offers stronger margins than mining alone, the expert wrote.
MARA is the latest bitcoin mining institution to pivot to AI and HPC. Core Scientific (CORZ) was archetypal to the enactment past June, erstwhile it announced a 12-year deal with AI unreality supplier CoreWeave (CRWV). The AI institution agreed to buy CORZ past period successful an all-share deal.
The pivot to HPC besides positions MARA successful sovereign unreality AI services, a niche wherever information remains backstage and segregated down firm firewalls, but wherever scaling requires heavy networking and compute expertise, the study said.
H.C. Wainwright said the acquisition is simply a astute introduction into HPC, giving MARA credibility it mightiness not execute connected its own. The broker reiterated its bargain standing connected the shares with a $28 terms target. The shares were 0.6% higher, trading astir $15.76 astatine work time.
While MARA's valuation has been buoyed by bitcoin’s caller rally, treasury adoption, and exchange-traded fund-fueled inflows, risks remain. These scope from BTC terms volatility and web trouble to superior dilution and the operational challenges of information halfway development, the study added.
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