NEW YORK, March 11, 2026, 12:02 EDT
MARA Holdings shares fell about 3.3% to $8.29 in Wednesday morning trading, lagging most major U.S.-listed bitcoin miners, while bitcoin slipped 1.3% to roughly $70,281. The move left the stock under pressure even as some peers steadied.
Why it matters now is that investors are repricing MARA as more than a straight bet on bitcoin. In its 2024 annual report, the company said it planned to hold bitcoin and not sell it for the foreseeable future. But in its March 2 filing, MARA said it had expanded its 2026 strategy to allow sales of bitcoin already on its balance sheet, a shift that changes the way the market reads its liquidity and growth plans. 1
The numbers are big enough for that policy change to matter. MARA ended 2025 with 53,822 bitcoin and $5.3 billion in liquid assets, but fourth-quarter revenue fell 6% to $202.3 million and it reported a $1.7 billion net loss as the average price of bitcoin it mined dropped and digital-asset values swung lower. 2
At the same time, MARA is trying to sell a different story. On Feb. 26, it said a partnership with Starwood Digital Ventures could deliver about 1 gigawatt of near-term IT capacity, with a path beyond 2.5 GW, and allow the sites to switch between bitcoin mining and AI workloads. “MARA’s power rich sites give customers what they need most: predictable access to energy at scale,” Chairman and CEO Fred Thiel said. 3
Wall Street has not stopped trimming expectations. Clear Street analyst Brian Dobson cut his price target to $9 last week and said his view “remains mixed,” valuing the mining business at about $2 a share and the high-performance computing, or HPC, partnership at $7. H.C. Wainwright separately downgraded MARA to Neutral from Buy after cutting its 2026 sales forecast on weaker bitcoin assumptions and risks tied to the business-model shift. 4
Wednesday’s price action showed how selective that trade has become. Riot Platforms was down 0.6%, but Core Scientific rose 3.4% and TeraWulf added 2.5%, suggesting investors were more willing to back names with cleaner near-term data-center or hosting narratives than MARA’s hybrid pitch.
High-performance computing is the heavy data-center work used for AI training and other compute-intensive tasks. Crypto miners have been chasing it because the same land, transmission access and power contracts that run mining rigs can sometimes be redirected to higher-margin customers; Reuters reported last year that miners and AI data-center operators were increasingly competing for the same power assets. 5
But the bullish case is still exposed to two hard variables: bitcoin and execution. Bitcoin dipped below $70,000 earlier Wednesday as investors turned cautious before U.S. inflation data, and H.C. Wainwright has said the Starwood plan hinges on winning large leases that have “proven to materialize slowly amid current peak demand.” If that tenant pipeline takes time to build, MARA may stay tied more closely to coin prices than the company wants. 6
