Why MARA Prefers Owning Electrons and Microgrid Vision

MARA’s Fred Thiel joins the Mining Pod to discuss the company’s AI and HPC plans, bitcoin, and the future of edge computing.

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Welcome back to The Mining Pod! Today, Fred Thiel, CEO and Chairman of MARA (formerly Marathon Digital Holdings), joins us to talk about MARA's strategic pivot toward AI and HPC infrastructure, the critical importance of energy ownership over PPAs, inference at the edge computing, MARA's partnerships with MPL and Exaion in Europe, and why Bitcoin's path to $1M will be harder than most think as the asset matures and institutionalizes.

Notes: 

• $1.4T AI spending planned over next 5 years

• MARA owns energy vs paying PPAs for electrons

• Many HPC contracts have strict delivery outs

• Bitcoin no longer follows 4-year cycle pattern

• 10% Bitcoin price change = $200B market move

• MARA has ~250 employees currently

Timestamps:

00:00 Start

04:05 Q3 look back

13:13 Inference at the edge

20:22 Sovereign cloud

27:13 MARA: hash cost vs hash price

29:33 Valuations not reflecting risk

33:22 MARA: value accretion

34:39 Operational deployment

37:07 Asset light vs hosting

41:47 Exaion deal

46:15 MPLX deal (natural gas )

50:22 CapEx costs

50:53 MPLX deal structure

56:23 CTO & 2PIC

1:01:28 Share dilution

1:12:31 What are you reading?

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