[DigitalToday reporter Yoonseo Lee] Shares of bitcoin mining company Mara Holdings rose about 15 percent at one point early in the session after it announced plans to buy a power site in the U.S. state of Texas.

Cointelegraph, a blockchain media outlet, reported on July 9 that Mara plans to secure a Texas site with access rights to up to 2 gigawatts of power that can be used for artificial intelligence computing and bitcoin mining, expanding its digital infrastructure business.

The site covers 1,200 acres in Matagorda County, 90 miles (145 km) southwest of Houston. Mara expects to gain access to an initial 1 GW of grid capacity by October 2027 and expand to up to 2 GW by April 2028. The company said it will develop the site into a digital infrastructure campus spanning high-performance computing (HPC) and bitcoin mining.

Once power supply is fully in place, Mara Holdings’ potential power capacity will rise to about 4.8 GW, more than double the current level. If the company signs a lease agreement with an HPC tenant, HIF USA will retain a minority stake in the project. The transaction amount was not disclosed.

Mara said in a post on X, formerly Twitter, that the project is still at an early stage of development and regulatory approval procedures remain. It also said construction will proceed in phases over several years. It effectively indicated that linking to actual AI data center demand and securing permits will be key variables in the project’s progress, even with large-scale power infrastructure in hand.

Mara’s expansion drive has become clearer this year. In April, the company announced plans to acquire Ohio-based Long Ridge Energy & Power in a deal valued at about 1.5 billion dollars. The deal included a 505-megawatt gas power plant and an adjacent data center. Earlier this year, it also secured a 64 percent stake in French computing infrastructure operator Exaion.

Across the mining industry, expansion into AI and high-performance computing is also becoming a major trend. As demand for data centers rises, companies are moving to use infrastructure built for bitcoin mining—such as grid connections, substations and energized sites—for AI businesses, rather than simply converting mining equipment.

Still, the cost of converting mining facilities into AI data centers is high. According to CoinShares, general mining infrastructure costs 700,000 dollars to 1 million dollars per megawatt, while liquid-cooled AI infrastructure requires 8 million dollars to 15 million dollars per megawatt. Hyperscale customers also demand higher power density and operational stability than many mining facilities were originally designed for.

Even so, investors are giving these conversion strategies high marks. Recently, Core Scientific expanded its hosting contract with CoreWeave to more than 10 billion dollars, and Hut 8 signed a 15-year data center lease agreement with Fluidstack worth 7 billion dollars. TeraWulf also said it secured a high-performance computing revenue contract worth several billion dollars. Expected revenue from that contract is about 19 billion dollars.

The market is also showing a trend of applying higher valuations to miners that secure AI and high-performance computing contracts. A structure is forming in which such firms are re-rated as power-based infrastructure companies rather than miners focused only on bitcoin production.

According to BitcoinTreasuries.NET, Mara is currently the fourth-largest public company holder of bitcoin, with 36,303 BTC. As a result, the market appears to be assessing Mara’s plan to secure the site as an infrastructure strategy that bundles power and data centers, going beyond an expansion of mining facilities.

A note on what to expect: this is early-stage, milestone-based development. It's subject to regulatory approvals, with phased construction and a multi-year build-out ahead. We're keeping commentary measured by design and will update as concrete milestones are reached.