On Monday, shares of MARA Holdings MARA 29.97% went through the roof after the cryptocurrency mining company said it was adding more capacity in Ohio in case the business grows even more.
MARA, which used to be known as Marathon Digital, mines cryptocurrencies with a focus on the blockchain environment and making digital assets.
On Monday afternoon, its shares price went up 23%, to about $23.77. Bitcoin, on the other hand, rose above $80,000 for the first time on Sunday and was above $84,000 early Monday morning, according to CoinDesk.
As of last Tuesday, November 8, the stock price of MARA has gone up more than 50%. According to Dow Jones Market Data, it is on track for its biggest gain since August 29, 2023, when it went up 28.81%.
MARA said it added about 372 megawatts of owned and run computing power at three locations in Ohio. The company plans to turn all of these sites on by the end of 2025. The business also said that the computing power for those places has been “bought, secured, and is ready for deployment.”
MARA bought two data centers in Hannibal and Hopedale, Ohio, on November 5. Together, they have “222 megawatts of interconnect-approved capacity.” The company has also started building a 150-megawatt plant in Findlay, Ohio. The plant already has 30 megawatts of power.
According to Salman Khan, Chief Financial Officer of MARA, the company bought the assets for about $270,000 per megawatt. Khan said this was “one of the lowest disclosed multiples amongst our larger publicly traded peers and demonstrates our unmatched ability to deliver accretive acquisitions.”
The data centers will add more than 70% more computing power to MARA’s owned and run computers.
MARA added almost 1 gigawatt of nameplate capacity through acquisitions and new developments on greenfield sites in 2024. This latest purchase brings its total nameplate capacity to just under 1.5 gigawatts, of which the company says about 65% is owned and run by MARA.
Chairman and CEO Fred Thiel said, “In addition to the financial benefits, these data centers add to the resilience of MARA’s flexible compute portfolio” and make the company more vulnerable to PJM, which is one of the biggest independent system providers. “We plan to add more and different types of owned and operated sites to our portfolio. This will help us save a lot of money.”
Lucas Pipes, a research note author at B. Riley, said last month that MARA Holdings, as the biggest Bitcoin miner in the U.S., was one of the companies that could benefit from Trump’s victory.
Pipes wrote, “Trump has been a strong supporter of cryptocurrency and promised to make the U.S. the ‘crypto capital of the planet’ and the ‘Bitcoin superpower of the world.'”
MARA is going to release its financial data for the third quarter on Tuesday.
