Why Did MARA Stock Pump 17%? The Next Target for MARA

MARA stock pump was one of the loudest moves in crypto-adjacent markets this week. MARA Holdings (NASDAQ: MARA) jumped nearly 17% in after-hours trading on Thursday, February 27, 2026. Bitcoin had nothing to do with it. A new partnership with Starwood Capital Group – a firm sitting on $125 billion in managed assets, caught Wall Street off guard in the best way possible. So what’s really going on, and does this move actually hold weight?

The Starwood Deal

MARA announced a strategic partnership with Starwood Digital Ventures, the data center division of Starwood Capital Group. The structure is pretty straightforward. MARA brings its existing U.S. mining sites to the table. Starwood handles everything on the build-out side,  design, construction, finding tenants, and running operations on the ground. Financing comes from both sides. Neither company is doing this alone.

The initial goal is to deliver over 1 gigawatt of IT capacity. The longer-term roadmap pushes that figure beyond 2.5 gigawatts.

MARA also secured the option to invest up to 50% in individual joint venture projects. That keeps real ownership in MARA’s hands on assets that will generate actual cash flow over time.

Post-announcement, the stock climbed to $9.88 in after-hours trading. Before the news dropped, it was sitting closer to $8.44. That’s a meaningful gap in a single session.

Also Read: Bitcoin Price Prediction 2025–2028: Halving Cycles & Institutional Adoption

Why the Market Reacted So Strongly to MARA’s News

The move made sense once you think about what miners actually own.

Bitcoin miners have been grinding through a tough stretch. The halving cut block rewards in half. Bitcoin’s price hasn’t exactly cooperated. Power costs stayed stubbornly high. For a lot of these companies, the math just stopped working the way it used to.

Those mining sites didn’t lose their value. They still have something that’s genuinely hard to come by right now: direct access to large power supplies.

Every major tech company trying to scale AI infrastructure is running into the same wall. Building new data centers takes years just to get power connected. MARA already solved that problem. Those sites are sitting on power capacity that AI workloads desperately need.

Starwood spotted that. The market spotted Starwood spotting that. And the stock moved.

MARA’s Q4 Numbers Were Actually Rough

The financials for Q4 weren’t pretty, and it’s worth being upfront about that.

MARA posted a GAAP EPS of -$4.52, missing analyst expectations by $3.35. Revenue landed at $202.3 million, which was 5.6% lower than the same quarter in 2024 and fell $49 million short of estimates. The net loss came in at $1.7 billion, a jarring contrast to the $528.3 million profit MARA posted in Q4 2024. Most of that damage, around $1.5 billion, traced back to a decline in the fair value of digital assets on the balance sheet.

Adjusted EBITDA swung to negative $1.5 billion from a positive $796 million a year earlier.

MARA pinned much of the revenue shortfall on a 14% drop in the average Bitcoin price during the quarter.

And yet the stock pumped. That’s the market saying it doesn’t particularly care about last quarter. It cares about the next few years.

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Bitcoin Isn’t Going Anywhere for MARA

CEO Fred Thiel made his position clear in the Q4 shareholder letter: “Bitcoin remains a core pillar of MARA’s strategy.”

This isn’t a company walking away from crypto. It’s a company that looked at its assets and asked what else they could do. The AI data center plays sits on top of the mining business; it doesn’t replace it.

MARA is not the only miner making this kind of move. Bitfarms went through a full rebrand, resurfacing as Keel Infrastructure with a renewed focus on high-performance compute and AI data center buildouts. Several other miners have been quietly pivoting their excess capacity in the same direction. After the halving squeezed margins sector-wide, diversifying into AI infrastructure became less of a bold strategy and more of a survival instinct.

What’s the Next Target for MARA?

Marathon Digital Holdings, Inc., MARA

Execution is everything from here.

If MARA and Starwood land real enterprise tenants and hit their capacity milestones on schedule, the story changes. MARA stops being valued purely as a Bitcoin miner and starts getting priced more like an infrastructure company. Those tend to trade at significantly higher multiples.

Keep an eye on tenant announcements and first gigawatt delivery timelines as the clearest proof points. If those land well in 2026, a move toward the $12 to $14 range is realistic. If the partnership stalls or timelines slip, expect the stock to give back a chunk of this week’s gains.

Also Read: Top 10 Best Strategies to Follow for the Bear Market 2026

Why did MARA stock pump 17% this week? 

MARA struck a deal with Starwood Digital Ventures to turn its existing mining sites into AI data centers. Investors liked the pivot. The stock jumped nearly 17% in after-hours trading on the announcement.

Is MARA walking away from Bitcoin? 

Not at all. CEO Fred Thiel was clear that Bitcoin stays central to the business. The Starwood deal adds a new revenue layer on top of mining, it doesn’t replace it.

Who is Starwood Digital Ventures? 

It is the data center arm of Starwood Capital Group, a global investment firm that manages over $125 billion in assets. Starwood Digital will lead the construction and operations side of the joint platform.

How bad were MARA’s Q4 2025 results? 

Rough. Net loss hit $1.7 billion, revenue dropped 5.6% year-over-year to $202.3 million, and EPS came in at -$4.52, well below what analysts had pencilled in.

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