Bitcoin miner MARA Holdings has entered a strategic partnership with Barry Sternlicht’s Starwood Capital Group to transform its current mining websites into knowledge 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 knowledge heart initiatives throughout MARA’s current portfolio. Starwood Digital Ventures, the agency’s knowledge heart platform, will deal with design, building, tenant sourcing, and operations. MARA will contribute websites with entry to low-cost vitality.
The joint platform targets roughly 1 gigawatt of near-term IT capability, with a pathway to greater than 2.5 gigawatts. The amenities shall be designed to change workloads between Bitcoin mining and AI compute relying on market circumstances and buyer demand. MARA can have the choice to retain as much as 50% possession within the three way partnership, with each corporations sharing improvement prices and earnings. Monetary phrases weren’t disclosed.
“Our partnership with Starwood will allow us to turn power certainty into capacity certainty,” mentioned MARA CEO Fred Thiel, including that the three way partnership provides a extra capital-efficient method to infrastructure buildout.
Starwood Capital manages greater than $125 billion in property. Starwood Digital Ventures operates a 94-person crew with knowledge 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 web 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 yr earlier. The corporate trails solely Michael Saylor’s Technique Inc. in company Bitcoin holdings.
MARA’s transfer matches a sample throughout the mining sector. Corporations that when targeted solely on Bitcoin manufacturing are repurposing their vitality property and bodily infrastructure for AI workloads, attracted by shorter lead occasions in comparison with constructing new amenities 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 big stake in Riot Platforms, pressuring the Texas-based miner to speed up its personal knowledge heart conversion efforts.
JLL and Paul Weiss served as MARA’s strategic and authorized advisors.
