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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?
