MARA Holdings announced on Friday it has completed the acquisition of a majority stake in French data center operator Exaion, securing 64% of MARA France after all regulatory approvals were obtained. The deal, originally inked in August 2025 with EDF Pulse Ventures, keeps French energy giant EDF as a minority shareholder and ongoing client.
NJJ Capital, the investment arm of telecom entrepreneur Xavier Niel, will pick up a 10% stake in MARA France. Both MARA CEO Fred Thiel and Xavier Niel will join Exaion's board alongside representatives from EDF Pulse Ventures and MARA, reflecting the new governance structure.
Miners Cross Into AI as Halving Squeezes Margins
Bitcoin's 2024 halving cut block rewards to 3.125 BTC, and network difficulty has kept climbing. That combo has hammered miner profits. Many now adopt a hybrid model: keep mining as a cash-flow engine but divert power and hardware into AI and high-performance computing.
HIVE Digital Technologies posted solid numbers even when Bitcoin prices dipped, thanks to expanding AI cloud services. CoreWeave pivoted fully from GPU mining to become a major AI infrastructure provider. TeraWulf, Hut 8, IREN, and MARA are all retrofitting mining sites and energy capacity for AI data centers.
Power Grid Volatility and Big Capital Moves
The mining network itself is anything but stable. Winter storms knocked out U.S. power grids, forcing many miners offline and causing hash rate to plunge. Mining difficulty dropped 11% earlier this week but rebounded roughly 15% to 144.4 trillion on Friday. Such wild swings push miners to rethink pure-play mining strategies.
Separately, CleanSpark said it plans to raise up to $1.28 billion via senior convertible notes to expand its mining and data center operations. These capital moves show that miners are rapidly converting cash and debt capacity into AI-ready computing assets.