MARA Holdings, the company formerly known as Marathon Digital and until recently the second-largest public holder of Bitcoin, sold $1.5 billion of the cryptocurrency in the first quarter and used the proceeds to retire debt, buy a power plant and reposition itself as an artificial intelligence infrastructure company.
The transformation is among the most dramatic in the short history of publicly listed crypto firms. A company that built its entire identity around accumulating Bitcoin is now explicitly telling investors it does not plan to buy more mining hardware, that the vast majority of its computing capacity could be converted to AI workloads, and that its most important asset is not cryptocurrency but electricity.
The numbers from Monday's first-quarter filing make the scale of the shift clear. Revenue fell 18% year on year to $174.6 million. The net loss widened to $1.26 billion, driven by unrealised losses on Bitcoin holdings as the cryptocurrency declined during the quarter. MARA sold 15,133 Bitcoin, including $1.1 billion worth near the end of March, to fund the repurchase of $1 billion in convertible notes, retiring roughly 30% of its outstanding convertible debt in a single transaction.
The sales dropped MARA from the second to the fourth-largest public Bitcoin treasury holder, behind Strategy, Tesla and Coinbase. The company ended the quarter with 35,303 Bitcoin.
Chief executive Fred Thiel's shareholder letter left little ambiguity about where the company is heading. "Power is the scarce input in AI," he wrote, framing the company's future around energy assets rather than hashrate. The centrepiece of the strategy is the $1.52 billion acquisition of Long Ridge Energy and Power, a 505-megawatt gas-fired power plant in Hannibal, Ohio, sitting on 1,600 contiguous acres along the Ohio River.
MARA already operates a Bitcoin mining facility adjacent to the Long Ridge site. The acquisition wraps the power generation, land, water access, fuel supply and grid interconnection into a single campus that the company says could eventually support more than 600 megawatts of AI computing load, enough to power a hyperscale data centre complex comparable to those operated by Amazon or Microsoft.
Construction of an initial AI and high-performance computing buildout is expected to begin in the first half of 2027, with capacity targeted for service by mid-2028. The power plant itself is already generating cash, with approximately 76% of capacity hedged under long-term contracts and all-in operating costs below $15 per megawatt hour, among the cheapest in the PJM interconnection, the regional grid that covers much of the eastern United States and hosts the densest concentration of data centre development in North America.
The pivot is not limited to Ohio. In February, MARA acquired a controlling stake in Exaion, a French AI and high-performance computing infrastructure operator previously owned by state-controlled utility EDF, for roughly $174 million, giving it a European foothold.
Days later, it signed a strategic partnership with Starwood Capital's data centre development platform, under which MARA contributes power-rich sites from its existing portfolio and Starwood handles engineering, construction and tenant sourcing for hyperscale AI data centres. The joint venture targets approximately one gigawatt of near-term computing capacity.
The underlying economics explain the urgency. Bitcoin mining revenue is hostage to three variables the company cannot control: the price of Bitcoin, network difficulty and transaction fees.
All three moved against MARA in the first quarter. The April 2025 halving, which cut the block reward miners receive by half, compressed margins across the industry. Energy costs, the single largest input for mining operations, are rising. And the specialist ASIC hardware used for mining depreciates rapidly and has no alternative use.
AI infrastructure inverts nearly all of those dynamics. Demand for data centre capacity is growing faster than supply. Tenants sign long-term leases at predictable rates. Power assets appreciate rather than depreciate. And the customer base, hyperscale cloud providers and enterprise AI companies offer a credit quality that no Bitcoin mining operation can match.
MARA is not the first miner to make this calculation. Core Scientific, Hut 8 and Bitdeer have all announced AI infrastructure strategies of varying ambition. But MARA's is the most aggressive: no new mining hardware, 90% of non-hosted capacity flagged for potential conversion, $1.5 billion in Bitcoin sold to fund the transition, and a power plant acquisition that redefines the company's core asset from processors to megawatts.
Related reading
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- Strategy's 'never sell' Bitcoin doctrine is over, and its own preferred stock killed it
- Anthropic finalising $1.5bn joint venture with Blackstone, Goldman Sachs and Hellman & Friedman
The risk is execution. MARA has never built or operated a data centre for third-party tenants. The Long Ridge acquisition does not close until the third quarter of 2026, subject to regulatory approval. Initial AI capacity is two years away. And the company is carrying a $1.26 billion quarterly loss while it navigates the transition.
For investors who bought MARA as a leveraged bet on Bitcoin, the company they own is becoming something fundamentally different: a power and infrastructure business that happens to mine cryptocurrency on the side. Whether that is a better business remains to be seen, but it is a candid acknowledgement from inside the mining industry that the economics of Bitcoin mining alone are no longer sufficient to justify the assets required to do it.
The recap
- MARA sold $1.5 billion of bitcoin to improve liquidity.
- First-quarter revenue fell 18% year over year to $174.6 million.
- MARA agreed to buy Long Ridge for $1.5 billion.
