MARA Holdings (MARA) is making a surprise pivot from its bitcoin (BTC) mining roots, announcing late Monday that it will acquire a 64% stake in Exaion, a high-performance computing (HPC) subsidiary of French energy giant EDF, broker H.C. Wainwright said in a research report Tuesday. While MARA has long floated the idea of helping power companies balance grid loads, H.C. Wainwright analyst Kevin Dede said he expected that to remain within a mining-centric strategy, not a direct plunge into HPC buildouts. But with bitcoin halving events looming in 2028 and 2032, and artificial intelligence (AI) demand driving premium returns on compute power, MARA is betting HPC offers stronger margins than mining alone, the analyst wrote. MARA is the latest bitcoin mining company to pivot to AI and HPC. Core Scientific (CORZ) was first to the party last June, when it announced a 12-year deal with AI cloud provider CoreWeave (CRWV). The AI company agreed to buy CORZ last month in an all-share deal. The pivot to HPC also positions MARA in sovereign cloud AI services, a niche where data remains private and segregated behind corporate firewalls, but where scaling requires deep networking and compute expertise, the report said. H.C. Wainwright said the acquisition is a smart entry into HPC, giving MARA credibility it might not achieve on its own. The broker reiterated its buy rating on the shares with a $28 price target. The shares were 0.6% higher, trading around $15.76 at publication time. While MARA's valuation has been buoyed by bitcoin’s recent rally, treasury adoption, and exchange-traded fund-fueled inflows, risks remain. These range from BTC price volatility and network difficulty to capital dilution and the operational challenges of data center development, the report added. Read more: MARA, Holder of Nearly $6B BTC, Raises $950M to Buy More Bitcoin
