Author: Nancy, PANews
Nowadays, it has become commonplace for mining companies to abandon cryptocurrencies and turn to AI.
Recently, the leading listed mining company MARA has been selling Bitcoin on a large scale. This signal of cashing out indicates that transitioning to AI is no longer a precautionary backup option but a critical necessity for survival.
Massively Selling of Coins to Cash Out $1.1 Billion, MARA Expands AI Business
On March 26, MARA disclosed that it had sold a total of 15,133 Bitcoins between March 4 and March 25, generating approximately $1.1 billion in revenue. These funds will be used to strengthen the balance sheet and provide greater strategic flexibility for expansion into the digital energy and AI/HPC sectors.
Earlier this month, MARA had already given the market heads-up by adjusting its treasury strategy from "only selling the current year's mining output" to "being able to sell accumulated Bitcoins on the balance sheet." This sell-off caused MARA to drop from the second-largest company in terms of Bitcoin holdings among listed mining companies, just after Strategy, to the third position. Currently, MARA still holds nearly 38,700 Bitcoins, with its holdings falling back to the level of December 2024.
Although MARA emphasized that it does not intend to liquidate most of its Bitcoin holdings, the scale of the sell-off reflects the increasing cash pressure on mining companies, a pressure stemming from the continued downturn in Bitcoin mining operations.
According to the latest report from CoinShares, Bitcoin miners are facing severe profitability challenges, with the hash price dropping to approximately $28-30/PH/s/day in Q1 2026, hitting a new low post-halving. Meanwhile, the weighted average cash cost in Q4 2025 reached about $80,000 per coin, with roughly 15-20% of global mining machines operating at a loss. VanEck recently disclosed that the total miner balance (excluding wallets attributed to Satoshi Nakamoto) is about 684,000 BTC, a year-on-year decrease of approximately 0.5%. During the same period, about 164,000 new BTC were mined, meaning that over the past year, miners have effectively sold off all newly produced supply.
These data provide an intuitive sense of how unprofitable the mining business has become. Moreover, MARA's early expansion relied on S19 series miners, and these older machines have severely compressed profit margins. However, the company has been gradually upgrading to more efficient models over the past two years.
AI Transition Becomes a Necessity for Mining Companies
Faced with mining pressure, MARA is accelerating its AI布局 (layout).
Just this February, MARA announced a collaboration with Starwood Digital Ventures, a subsidiary of Starwood Capital Group, to convert and expand part of its U.S. sites originally used for Bitcoin mining into data centers catering to enterprise cloud and artificial intelligence clients. Starwood is one of the most representative real estate investment institutions in the U.S. and has been heavily betting on digital infrastructure in recent years, building one of the world's top private data center portfolios.
In fact, MARA CEO Fred Thiel proposed as early as 2024 that successful Bitcoin miners would integrate AI components in the long term, leveraging low-cost energy to provide services for AI data centers. He expressed hope that 50% of the company's revenue would come from non-Bitcoin mining businesses within the next four years.
That year, MARA also began its transition to AI infrastructure, utilizing the power resources and data center sites accumulated from Bitcoin mining to pivot towards high-performance computing (HPC) and AI data centers.
In January of this year, Fred Thiel stated in an interview that data centers and Bitcoin mining farms are competing for the same scarce resource: reliable electricity and its supporting infrastructure, with land, power, and operational control determining who can scale up. He recently warned that the industry is becoming increasingly brutal, and only mining companies with access to low-cost, reliable energy or those adopting new business models can survive. Bitcoin mining companies must control power resources; otherwise, they risk being eliminated before the next halving. By 2028, mining companies will face three paths: becoming power producers, being acquired by power producers, or partnering with them.
Now, major mining companies including MARA, Bitdeer, and Core Scientific are advancing AI infrastructure businesses and significantly selling off Bitcoin reserves to support this transition.
According to Coinshares, listed mining companies have collectively secured over $70 billion in AI/HPC contracts, and by the end of 2026, up to 70% of the revenue for listed mining firms could come from AI. Simultaneously, a clear divergence in valuations has emerged: mining companies with HPC contracts have an EV/NTM revenue multiple of 12.3x, while pure mining companies stand at 5.9x. The industry has bifurcated into infrastructure companies and mining companies, with vastly different prospects.
The AI transition has become a necessity for mining companies, but the high costs of transformation and hardware expansion make this new arms race expensive, forcing mining companies to liquidate their assets to alleviate short-term pressure.
