Marathon Digital Bets Its Bitcoin Mining Power Assets Can Fuel AI Data Center Growth

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Sat, May 30, 2026 astatine 6:02 PM CDT 6 min read

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Marathon Digital (NASDAQ:MARA) Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Fred Thiel said the company’s propulsion into AI and high-performance computing infrastructure has been a multiyear process built connected its acquisition aggregating low-cost powerfulness and information halfway capableness for bitcoin mining.

Speaking astatine TD Cowen’s 54th Annual CMT Conference successful a fireside chat with communications infrastructure expert Michael Elias, Thiel said MARA’s strategy evolved from an asset-light bitcoin mining exemplary into ownership of land, powerfulness and information halfway assets. He said that displacement positioned the institution to measure AI infrastructure opportunities arsenic request for power-constrained computing capableness accelerated.

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Thiel said MARA primitively focused connected bringing compute to hosted bitcoin mining sites alternatively than owning the underlying infrastructure. That attack made consciousness erstwhile the institution could give much superior straight to mining machines, helium said.

But by 2023, aft accent successful the bitcoin mining sector, MARA was capable to get “70% of each the capableness wherever we operated astatine little than replacement cost,” Thiel said. Those purchases gave the institution ownership of onshore and powerfulness astatine galore of its operating sites.

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Thiel said MARA aboriginal added powerfulness assets, including a upwind farm, and began mining utilizing flare state successful lipid fields. He besides pointed to a 250-megawatt woody successful the United Arab Emirates, wherever MARA developed 2 information centers successful Abu Dhabi that usage immersion liquid cooling and run without aerial conditioning.

“All the types of technologies you request to usage for AI successful the future,” Thiel said.

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Thiel said MARA began looking earnestly astatine AI opportunities successful 2023 and 2024. While hyperscale unreality companies necessitate highly specialized information halfway designs, helium said MARA determined it would request a spouse alternatively than gathering an full tenant-leasing and improvement enactment connected its own.

The institution hired a third-party advisor to measure which of its sites would beryllium charismatic to hyperscalers and what upgrades would beryllium needed. Thiel said the results showed that “the immense majority” of MARA’s sites were charismatic to imaginable counterparties.