MARA Holdings sold $1.5B Bitcoin to fund AI pivot

MARA Holdings sold $1.5 billion in bitcoin in Q1 2026, dropping to the fourth largest public BTC holder.

MARA Holdings (NASDAQ: MARA) sold 20,880 bitcoin during Q1 2026 at an average price of $70,137 per coin, generating approximately $1.5 billion in proceeds. The company used $1.1 billion of that near quarter-end to repurchase convertible notes and improve its liquidity position as it repositions away from pure bitcoin mining.

As a result, MARA dropped from the second to the fourth largest publicly traded holder of bitcoin, ending March with 35,303 BTC worth approximately $2.4 billion. First-quarter revenue fell 18% year over year to $174.6 million, and the company posted a $1.26 billion net loss, largely driven by a 22% decline in bitcoin’s price during the quarter.

How MARA is repositioning itself

In its Form 10-Q filing, MARA now describes itself as “a digital infrastructure company built to convert energy into high-value compute workloads,” placing AI and high-performance computing alongside bitcoin mining rather than treating it as a secondary focus.

Management said up to 90% of its non-hosted mining capacity could ultimately be redirected to AI and critical IT workloads, and confirmed the company has no current plans to purchase additional bitcoin mining hardware.

The Starwood Capital joint venture, announced in Q4 2025, is progressing toward active development, with MARA contributing power-rich sites and Starwood leading design, tenant sourcing, and construction. The structure allows MARA to preserve mining operations on available capacity while scaling AI infrastructure selectively.

After quarter-end, MARA also agreed to acquire Long Ridge Energy and Power, a 505-megawatt combined-cycle gas plant in Ohio, in a $1.5 billion transaction. The campus sits on 1,600 contiguous acres and could support more than one gigawatt of total AI and computing capacity over time.

Context: mining-to-AI pivot across the sector

MARA’s shift reflects a broader trend among publicly traded miners. Core Scientific is converting its Pecos, Texas, site into a 1.5-gigawatt AI data center campus, while IREN completed a $3.4 billion deal with Nvidia in May. Public miners have collectively signed more than $70 billion in AI infrastructure contracts since late 2024.

Fred Thiel, MARA’s chairman and CEO, has framed the pivot as an extension of the company’s core competency. “Bitcoin mining is not a legacy business we are moving away from.

It is the operational foundation on which we are building,” he said. MARA also acquired a controlling interest in French AI and HPC data center operator Exaion for $174.5 million during the quarter.