Bitcoin miner MARA Holdings has entered a strategic partnership with Barry Sternlicht’s Starwood Capital Group to transform its present mining websites into information heart infrastructure for synthetic intelligence and cloud computing.
MARA shares jumped roughly 17% in after-hours buying and selling following the February 26 announcement.
Joint Enterprise Targets 2.5 GW Capability
The 2 corporations will collectively develop, finance, and function information heart initiatives throughout MARA’s present portfolio. Starwood Digital Ventures, the agency’s information heart platform, will deal with design, development, tenant sourcing, and operations. MARA will contribute websites with entry to low-cost power.
The joint platform targets roughly 1 gigawatt of near-term IT capability, with a pathway to greater than 2.5 gigawatts. The services shall be designed to modify workloads between Bitcoin mining and AI compute relying on market situations and buyer demand. MARA may have the choice to retain as much as 50% possession within the three way partnership, with each corporations sharing growth prices and income. Monetary phrases weren’t disclosed.
“Our partnership with Starwood will permit us to show energy certainty into capability certainty,” stated MARA CEO Fred Thiel, including that the three way partnership gives a extra capital-efficient method to infrastructure buildout.
Starwood Capital manages greater than $125 billion in belongings. Starwood Digital Ventures operates a 94-person workforce with information heart experience throughout greater than 10 GW.
Miners Pivot Towards AI Infrastructure
The announcement coincided with MARA’s fourth-quarter earnings, which revealed a $1.7 billion internet loss pushed largely by unrealized writedowns on its Bitcoin holdings. Quarterly income got here in at $202 million, down 6% from the identical interval a 12 months earlier. The corporate trails solely Michael Saylor’s Technique Inc. in company Bitcoin holdings.
MARA’s transfer matches a sample throughout the mining sector. Firms that after targeted solely on Bitcoin manufacturing are repurposing their power belongings and bodily infrastructure for AI workloads, attracted by shorter lead occasions in comparison with constructing new services from scratch.
A number of miners that embraced this transition early, together with IREN, TeraWulf, and Cipher Mining, have seen their market capitalizations outpace MARA’s regardless of producing much less Bitcoin mining hash energy. In the meantime, Starboard Worth has taken a major stake in Riot Platforms, pressuring the Texas-based miner to speed up its personal information heart conversion efforts.
JLL and Paul Weiss served as MARA’s strategic and authorized advisors.