If You Can't Beat Them, Join Them

MARA Holdings $MARA just reported earnings after the close and the numbers were almost beside the point.

The real story is that MARA has finally capitulated on its pure-play Bitcoin mining strategy.

The company announced a landmark joint venture with Starwood Capital Group, a firm managing over $125 billion in assets, to convert MARA's existing mining sites into AI-capable data centers.

The market's verdict was immediate: shares jumped 17% after hours.

This is significant because MARA was the last major holdout. While other names like IREN, Core Scientific, TeraWulf, and Cipher Mining were pivoting hard into AI throughout 2024 and 2025, MARA's CEO was still saying on last year's earnings calls that the company remained focused on bitcoin mining.

That conviction on HODLing came at a steep cost.

I'm not much of an earnings guy, but what caught my attention was the operational crunch MARA found itself in. The company threw more resources at mining, and still produced fewer Bitcoin than the prior quarter as it became more difficult to mine Bitcoin. That's the tension with pure-play mining over the long run, you have to run harder and harder just to stay in place.

Meanwhile, the early movers to AI have been re-rated by the market at breathtaking speed.

IREN went from around $5 to an all-time high of $77 in November 2025, roughly a 15x move, after landing a $10 billion AI cloud deal with Microsoft.

Core Scientific emerged from bankruptcy to sign a $10+ billion hosting deal with CoreWeave.

Hut 8 secured a $7 billion lease with Google-backed Fluidstack.

MARA watched all of this from the sidelines and their stock price suffered. Just look at this brutal comparison of IREN and MARA while this has been happening.

The articles I've read are saying MARA's revenue will still be driven by Bitcoin mining in the near term, and they're right because the AI revenue ramp takes time.

But they're underestimating how aggressively the market reprices narrative shifts in this space.

The 17% after-hours pop wasn't about Q4 revenue. It was the market beginning to re-rate MARA from a pure Bitcoin miner toward an AI-adjacent infrastructure company.

We've seen this movie before with every other miner that pivoted; the stock moves first, the revenue follows later.

The question now is whether MARA can close the execution gap with competitors who have a 12–18 month head start.

Cheers,

Louis Sykes
Senior Crypto Analyst, All Star Charts