Layoffs, selling coins, developing AI: MARA's transformation is just a typical example of what mining companies are doing.

Zhu Qiu, Golden Finance

Abstract

On April 3, 2026, Bitcoin mining firm MARA cut 15% of its workforce, using the move to accelerate its strategic shift from a pure-play Bitcoin mining company to an energy and digital infrastructure company, while ramping up its AI infrastructure rollout. Previously, the company entered the AI compute market by acquiring 64% of Exaion; now, with its Bitcoin mining business continuing to post massive losses and AI compute demand surging explosively, it has become the double core driver behind its transformation. It’s not just MARA—around the world, the AI transformation paths of mining firms have already been underway for some time……

MARA, one of the world’s largest Bitcoin mining firms (NASDAQ: MARA), has laid off roughly 15% of employees, affecting full-time staff across multiple departments as well as some contract workers. In an internal memo, MARA CEO Fred Thiel said the layoffs were not purely a financial decision, but part of the company’s strategic transition from a pure Bitcoin mining company to an energy and digital infrastructure company.

The move reflects MARA’s proactive “downsizing,” pulling resources away from its traditional mining business and redirecting them toward the AI space, which offers greater growth potential.

I. From a mining firm to a digital infrastructure provider: MARA’s transformation journey

On February 26 of this year, MARA Holdings, Inc. previously announced that it had reached a strategic agreement with Starwood Capital Group (“Starwood”) and its dedicated data center development platform Starwood Digital Ventures (“SDV”). The partnership will help MARA upgrade the transformation of parts of its data centers, building next-generation digital infrastructure to meet the growing needs of enterprise, hyperscale, and artificial intelligence customers.

SDV leads design, development, tenant recruitment, construction, and facilities operations, while Starwood provides investment expertise to improve project economics. MARA contributes dedicated, energy-efficient data centers. The two sides will deliver about 1 gigawatt of IT capacity and are expected to ultimately reach 2.5 gigawatts or more.

MARA sits at the intersection of energy and compute, and SDV’s development engine provides strong execution and operating capabilities—capabilities that are crucial to MARA’s ability to convert and scale at that intersection into scalable and sustainable digital infrastructure.

The dual-purpose design of these data centers enables them to run artificial intelligence/enterprise/high-performance computing workloads and Bitcoin mining at the same time, allowing operational flexibility amid a constantly changing market environment. This modular approach allows Marathon to obtain “highly attractive economic terms” from data center customers with higher profit margins while continuing its mining business.

MARA’s AI push can be traced back to 2025.

In August 2025, broker HC Wainwright pointed out that Bitcoin miner MARA would acquire a 64% stake in Exaion, a high-performance computing (HPC) company owned by French energy giant EDF, and that it could increase its stake to 75% by 2027. In February of this year, an announcement on MARA’s official website showed that the transaction for MARA France to acquire a 64% stake in Exaion had been completed; EDF remains a minority shareholder and customer, and NJJ has invested in MARA France with a 10% stake. Exaion does HPC data centers and secure cloud/AI, with a board including Xavier Niel and MARA CEO Fred Thiel, aiming to accelerate its expansion in Europe.

This marks MARA’s first substantive entry into the AI/HPC field, transitioning from a mining firm to a participant in providing compute services.

II. Why transform?

1. Mining operations losses

At the same time as it announced its transformation plans in February, MARA also released its 2025 fourth-quarter results: despite improvements in operations, it still posted a large net loss.

In the 2025 fourth quarter, MARA’s net loss was $1.7 billion (or $4.52 loss per share). This sharply contrasts with the $528 million net profit from the same period last year. Revenue fell 6% year over year to $202 million, below analysts’ expectation of $253.65 million.

MARA’s performance in the fourth quarter reflects the severe challenges faced by Bitcoin miners, with multiple adverse factors weighing on its profitability. The company’s financial and operational overview shows that overall core operating metrics remained under pressure.

Even though compute increased 25% year over year to 66.4 EH/s and Bitcoin supply rose 20% to 53,822 BTC, production dropped 19% to 2,011 BTC due to increased network difficulty. MARA successfully improved cost efficiency, lowering its daily cost per PET of compute by 4% to $30.50. However, this was not enough to offset the impact of Bitcoin price volatility and intensifying network competition.

Due to major impairment charges and operating pressure, adjusted EBITDA crashed from $796 million in the fourth quarter of 2024 to negative $1.5 billion. The company holds about $5.3 billion in cash and Bitcoin, but faces substantial debt of up to $3.64 billion, and in the past 12 months its leveraged free cash flow consumed $1.77 billion.

2. AI surges

MARA’s adjustments are also intended to align with the current big-picture trend of AI surging.

Power demand for AI data centers will grow from about 50 gigawatts in 2025 to 200 gigawatts in 2030—an increase of up to 255%—requiring investments of tens of trillions of dollars.

According to a Goldman Sachs research report: by 2030, global data center power demand will grow by approximately 165%–200% versus today, with the share from AI-related workloads continuing to rise. McKinsey & Company noted that the cumulative investment demand for AI infrastructure (compute + data centers + power) could reach the scale of tens of trillions of dollars within the next few years.

In the AI wave, MARA either continues to absorb losses caused by BTC uncertainty, or pivots to the compute-demand market, which is driven by hard, essential needs. A BTC mining site is essentially natural AI compute infrastructure, so MARA’s transformation looks more like an industry upgrade that rides the trend.

III. Mining firms are collectively moving onto the path of transformation

MARA’s transformation is not isolated—it is a typical snapshot of the entire mining firm circle.

Over the past year, as profitability margins for BTC mining have gotten smaller and the AI-driven compute demand explosion has taken off, global mining firms are all going through a new round of transformation waves.

According to data released by S&P in February: although revenues from high-performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI) have been relatively limited so far, infrastructure investment is accelerating. Analysts predict that starting in 2026, HPC will deliver a significant revenue contribution. HPC is no longer a side business— for multiple mining companies, it is expected to become a main growth pillar in the coming few years. In particular, IREN, Terawulf, and Core Scientific are now almost entirely focused on HPC development; analysts predict these businesses will drive most of these companies’ revenue growth in 2026.

By 2026, high-performance computing (HPC) revenue will account for 13% of Riot’s total revenue. Other companies’ shifts are even more pronounced: IREN’s HPC revenue is expected to jump from 3% in 2024 to 71% of total revenue; Core Scientific is expected to rise from 5% to 71%; HIVE from 7% to 15%; Cipher Mining and Terawulf are expected to reach 34% and 70%, respectively, while their contributions in 2024 were nearly negligible.

This transition highlights the industry’s strategic shift away from relying on cryptocurrencies and toward growth driven by artificial intelligence and high-performance computing. Miners are positioning themselves as providers of HPC infrastructure, offering hosting services such as power, cooling, and physical infrastructure.

Below are examples of crypto mining firms transforming.

1.Core Scientific, Inc.

Core Scientific was founded in 2017 in Seattle, but later moved its operating headquarters to Austin. Its founders include former Microsoft COO B. Kevin Turner. The company initially focused on Bitcoin mining using renewable energy and digital asset infrastructure.

However, due to the sharp drop in Bitcoin prices and high debt levels, Core Scientific filed for bankruptcy protection under Chapter 11 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code at the end of 2022. During the bankruptcy proceedings, the company’s operations continued. In January 2024, after large-scale restructuring and reorganization, the company emerged from its bankruptcy predicament.

Since 2024, the company has increasingly emphasized high-performance computing (HPC) for artificial intelligence. In 2025, the company signed data center operating contracts worth $10 billion. In July 2025, CoreWeave announced plans to acquire Core Scientific for $9 billion.

In March 2026, Core Scientific announced the sale of roughly $175 million worth of Bitcoin to accelerate the expansion of its AI infrastructure. On the other hand, its Bitcoin mining business will be stopped. In addition to selling Bitcoin, the company also obtained a $1 billion loan to build new data centers across multiple U.S. states.

As of March 2026, Core Scientific currently operates 10 data centers across seven U.S. states.

2.CoreWeave, Inc.

CoreWeave was founded in 2017 in New Jersey by three commodity traders—Michael Intrator, Brian Venturo, and Brannin McBee—and Peter Salanki. The company was originally named Atlantic Crypto, a cryptocurrency mining company that mined Ethereum using graphics processing units (GPUs). After the cryptocurrency crash in 2018, the company changed its name to CoreWeave in 2019, using its massive GPU inventory to begin providing cloud computing infrastructure to enterprises.

As demand for AI processing kept growing in the markets of 2022 and 2023, CoreWeave’s business—with exclusive access to Nvidia GPUs—achieved significant growth. CoreWeave became the first cloud service provider to offer Nvidia GB200 NVL72 chip cloud services via cloud computing in February 2025. IBM announced it would use a GB200 cluster to train its Granite AI.

In January 2026, CoreWeave received a $2B investment from NVIDIA, with an acquisition price of $87.20 per share, and both sides expanded cooperation to promote CoreWeave’s data center construction. In February 2026, CoreWeave sought $8.5 billion in new funding, using a major AI infrastructure contract signed with Meta Platforms as collateral.

3.IREN

IREN was formerly Iris Energy, founded in 2018 by brothers Daniel & Will Roberts. In its early days, the company focused on Bitcoin mining powered 100% by hydropower/wind power, branding itself as “green mining.” When it went public in 2021, it expanded its compute capacity to 50 EH/s (the top 5 mining firms globally).

During the crypto winter in 2023, it paused mining expansion and reserved Texas power interconnection rights. It also renamed to IREN, softening its crypto branding.

In October 2025, IREN signed a five-year, $9.7 billion AI cloud services contract with Microsoft. In March 2026, it signed a $3.5 billion contract with Dell and increased its order by 50k units of NVIDIA Blackwell B300.

4.Terawulf

Terawulf was founded in 2019 and focuses on Bitcoin mining and clean energy.

In 2024, it established the WULF Compute subsidiary, dedicated solely to AI/HPC hosting, fully transforming its mining sites into liquid-cooled AI data centers.

2025 became its milestone year for a surge in orders. In August, it signed a 450MW, 10-year, $6.7 billion contract with Fluidstack, backed by Google. In December, it also reached a cooperation of 72.5MW, 10 years, $1.1 billion with the UAE’s G42/Core42. Total signed-up HPC business for the year added up to 522MW, with total contract value of $12.8 billion; AI/HPC revenue was $16.9 million, accounting for 10% of total revenue for the year. It also received a $3.2 billion equity + debt investment package from Google and a total $6.5 billion financing package.

5.HIVE

HIVE’s full name is HIVE Digital Technologies Ltd. It was founded in 2017 by Frank Holmes, Aydin Kilic, and others. The core team has experience in the cryptocurrency, energy, and technology sectors; from the outset, the company set its development direction as “clean energy + crypto mining.”

In 2024, HIVE officially launched its AI compute transformation strategy. HIVE has become the third-largest AI transformation mining firm in North America (only behind IREN and Terawulf). It has a first-mover advantage in Canada’s sovereign AI cloud market; the results of its transformation are gradually taking shape, forming a stable development pattern driven by a “mining + AI” dual-wheel approach.

Summary

From the cases above, we can see that the wave of crypto mining firms transforming has already started. Mining firms are turning themselves into AI training centers, GPU cloud service platforms, and HPC hosting facilities; and some mining firms have also shifted from previously holding cryptocurrencies to selling coins to fund AI investments. This can also be seen as a re-pricing of compute assets: in the past, compute was consumed in mining, making compute dependent on coin prices; now, compute is starting to serve real industrial needs such as training and inference of AI models. This kind of change is not only the most real reflection of market conditions in the broader downturn of the crypto industry, but also a structural optimization that the market is getting as the AI era arrives.