MARA Targets AI Expansion With $168M Exaion Deal

MARA Holdings Inc. is close to acquiring a controlling stake in Exaion from Electricité de France SA in a deal worth about $168 million. According to an SEC filing, the agreement would give MARA 64% ownership of Exaion through EDF Pulse Ventures, EDF’s venture arm.

The $Bitcoin miner could later raise its stake to 75% for an additional $127 million if certain conditions are met. EDF would remain a minority shareholder in the French high-performance computing firm.

MARA is seeking to expand beyond #cryptocurrency operations into artificial intelligence infrastructure. Exaion deploys and manages data centers of high-performance computing, cloud services, and AI infrastructure.

Its services help to establish sovereign data systems for companies to retain control over sensitive information and work on AI-based applications. The strategy by #MARA is to focus on #AI inference services.

This is a part of AI data processing with less required investment compared to training the whole model. MARA’s model is a contrast to the direction of other miners such as Core Scientific and Hut 8. These two firms supply infrastructure to hyperscale cloud providers.