MARA Holdings - Earnings Call - Q1 2025

Executive Summary

• Revenue rose 30% YoY to $213.9M, driven by a 77% higher average BTC price, but sequentially was flat vs Q4 ($213.9M vs $214.4M).
• EPS was a significant miss versus consensus as MARA reported diluted EPS of -$1.55 vs -$0.375* expected; revenue modestly missed $213.9M vs $217.6M*; Q4 was a beat on both EPS ($1.27 vs $0.679*) and revenue ($214.4M vs $183.9M*).
• The quarter’s net loss (-$533.4M) was primarily driven by a $510.2M loss on fair value of digital assets and an additional $(116.1)M change in fair value of digital assets receivable, reflecting BTC price at quarter-end; management flagged that BTC near ~$100k post-quarter implies a substantial fair value gain in Q2.
• Operationally strong: Energized hash rate reached 54.3 EH/s (+95% YoY), cost per petahash per day improved to $28.5 (down 25% YoY, 10% sequential), blocks won rose 81% YoY to 666.
• Near-term catalysts: potential Q2 fair value recovery if BTC price holds, announcements on public-private energy partnerships, progress on 114 MW wind farm and 25 MW flare gas operations, and commercialization of 2PIC cooling and AI-edge infrastructure.

What Went Well and What Went Wrong

What Went Well

• Strategic pivot to owned energy lowered structural costs: purchased energy cost per BTC was $35,728 and $0.04/kWh at owned sites; cost per petahash/day improved to $28.5 (25% YoY, 10% QoQ).
• Hashrate and scale expanded: energized hash rate reached 54.3 EH/s (+95% YoY); BTC holdings rose to 47,531 including loaned/collateralized BTC (+174% YoY), combined cash+BTC ~$4.1B at quarter-end.
• Management emphasized vertical integration and tech differentiation: “We’re forging ahead, staying true to our strategy… transforming MARA into a vertically integrated digital energy and infrastructure company”. They also highlighted 2PIC pilots and own mining pool “outperformed the network average by over 10%”.

What Went Wrong

• Large non-operating loss on digital assets: net loss of $(533.4)M, with $(510.2)M loss on fair value of digital assets, and $(116.1)M on digital assets receivable, driven by BTC price at 3/31/25 vs 12/31/24.
• Adjusted EBITDA swung to a loss of $(483.6)M from $542.1M in Q1 2024 despite higher revenue, reflecting fair value changes and higher G&A tied to scale (headcount ~171 vs 72 YoY).
• BTC production moderated sequentially: BTC produced was 2,286 (down 8% QoQ) and average BTC/day 25.4 (down 6% QoQ); blocks won dipped QoQ to 666 from 703 despite YoY growth, reflecting network difficulty and halving effects.

Transcript

Moderator (participant)

At this time, it is my pleasure to turn the floor over to your host, Robert Samuels, VP of Investor Relations. Sir, the floor is yours.

Robert Samuels (VP of Investor Relations)

Thank you, Operator. Good afternoon and welcome to MARA's First Quarter 2025 earnings call. Thank you for joining us today. With me on today's call are our Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Fred Thiel, and our Chief Financial Officer, Salman Khan. Today's call includes forward-looking statements, including those about our growth plans, liquidity, and financial performance. These involve risks and uncertainties, and actual results may differ materially. We disclaim any obligation to update these statements except as required by law. For more details, see the risk factor section of our latest 10-K and other SEC filings. We'll also reference non-GAAP financial measures like adjusted EBITDA and return on capital employed, which we believe are important indicators of MARA's operating performance because they exclude certain items that we do not believe directly reflect our core operations. Please see our earnings release for reconciliations to the most comparable GAAP measures.

We hope you've had the chance to read our shareholder letter and look forward to your feedback. We'll begin with some prepared remarks from Fred and Salman. After their comments, we are going to be conducting an analyst interview with management. Today's session will be conducted by Stephen Glagola, an analyst at Jones Trading. With that out of the way, I'm going to turn the call over to Fred to kick things off. Fred.

Fred Thiel (Chairman and CEO)

Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone, and thanks for joining us. Despite a volatile start to the year, with global markets pulling back much of the momentum they gained ahead of President Trump's inauguration, Bitcoin has shown remarkable resilience. At MARA, we believe Bitcoin is increasingly positioned as a macro hedge, much like gold, offering protection in uncertain environments. Our stock tends to move with the overall mood of the market, especially when it comes to how investors feel about Bitcoin. In risk-off environments, our stock often trades down with the rest of the sector, even when our fundamentals remain solid. This correlation is largely tied to Bitcoin's price and broad sentiment towards miners. We believe the market is not fully recognizing the strength of our core mining business, one of the largest in the sector.

Meanwhile, some of our peers with smaller operations and little to no Bitcoin holdings are being assigned greater value, which does not reflect the full picture. Some of our competitors have publicly announced plans to limit mining growth or pivot towards hosting and AI GPU operations, while others are expanding by staying grid-attached and investing in new machines, making them less capital efficient. Meanwhile, we are focused on delivering long-term, low-cost energy solutions that outlast market cycles. We are doing this by transforming MARA into a vertically integrated digital energy and infrastructure company. This model gives us tighter operational control, improves cost effectiveness, and strengthens our vision—sorry, strengthens our resilience against broader economic shifts. To achieve this transformation, we are focused on two key priorities: strategic growth with low-cost energy and efficient capital deployment, and advancing research and development of digital energy technologies.

In 2021, we predicted a paradigm shift in our industry, where power producers and miners would converge to utilize and access energy, especially during periods of low demand, thereby stabilizing the grid and maximizing profits. We've now seen that vision begin to take hold, with the power industry acknowledging the benefits of Bitcoin mining as a flexible load. To deliver on this vision, we're in discussions with governments and global energy corporations in the U.S., Europe, and the Middle East, which could result in substantially lower energy costs and greater CapEx efficiency. Chasing exahash targets at grid-attached prices invites short-term thinking, and we're focused on long-term partnerships to achieve and maintain a low-cost energy strategy. In Q1, MARA delivered strong operational metrics. Our purchased energy cost per Bitcoin was $35,728. Our daily cost per petahash improved 25% year over year.

Near the start of this quarter, we completed construction at our fully owned 200 MW data center in Ohio, with 100 MW now online and over 12,000 S21 Pro miners installed. In April, we fully energized 25 MW of gas-to-power operations in North Dakota and Texas, monetizing excess gas and mitigating methane emissions for the producers. We are now in the process of building out our 114 MW wind farm site in Texas, giving us behind-the-meter low-cost power to extend the life of legacy hardware that otherwise would have been retired. We plan to be fully operational at that site in the second half of this year. Through owning infrastructure, self-generating power, extending asset longevity, and managing costs, we are driving capital and operational proficiency across our business.

Regarding our second key priority, Mara is investing in and developing digital energy technologies, which can both improve the efficiency of our operations and diversify our revenue streams. As many of you are aware, we're a founding investor in Auradine, a U.S.-based ASIC manufacturer whose chips are more power-efficient than current market offerings. We have now begun manufacturing custom miners specific to Mara's needs and applications, providing unique cost and performance advantages. Our hardware 2PIC, two-phase immersion cooling, is now being deployed at two customer sites, one domestic and one international, with a 30 MW pilot underway. Preliminary data indicates that 2PIC is successful in enabling miners to increase operational hash rate with minimal losses in productivity, potentially reducing CapEx by up to one-third for a typical mining installation.

Our software, MARA Pool, enables us to capture higher revenues and keep 100% of transaction fees, with block rewards outperforming the network average by over 10%. Looking ahead, we're positioning MARA solutions to support AI inference workloads, which require modular low-latency infrastructure. We're already in advanced talks with several compute OEMs to roll out pilots this year. 2025 is an important year for MARA as we continue our transformation into a vertically integrated digital asset, digital energy, and infrastructure company. We look forward to sharing more news as the year progresses. In conclusion, in Q1, we reduced costs, increased profitability, and proved we can design, build, and operate infrastructure powered by cell phones energy. Thank you for your support as we continue our transformation. We've come a long way, but this is only the beginning.

Now let me turn the call over to Salman for some highlights from the quarter. Salman.

Salman Khan (CFO)

Thank you, Fred. Q1 was a challenging quarter as the average price of Bitcoin declined meaningfully compared to Q4, and greater network difficulty combined with rising global hash rate impacted our production. Despite these recent headwinds, over the past year, our energized hash rate increased 95% to 54.3 exahash per second in Q1 of 2025, from 27.8 exahash per second in Q1 of 2024. Also, we currently hold over 48,000 Bitcoin on our balance sheet. Since our full HODL announcement in July of last year, the price of Bitcoin has increased approximately 52%. At MARA's twin turbo strategy of accumulating Bitcoin through mining and purchases, we expect it to create significant value for our shareholders over time.

By mining Bitcoin at one of the largest—I'm sorry—by mining Bitcoin at one of the lowest direct energy costs per coin in the sector, while also opportunistically acquiring Bitcoin, we can capture upside from both operational profitability and Bitcoin price appreciation. Now let me provide some financial highlights for the quarter. I would first like to point out that since the beginning of 2024, we have transformed MARA from 0% owned and operated capacity to approximately 70%. As a result, we made changes to how we present our financial results to give investors a clearer view of our business. The goal with these changes is to make our financials more transparent and better reflect the way our business is evolving. We also reclassified our prior period numbers to be consistent with the new format. These updates did not affect our reported financial position, results, or cash flows.

Revenues increased 30% to $213.9 million from $165.2 million in the first quarter of 2024. Average price of Bitcoin was 77% higher this quarter than the prior year period and contributed about $90.7 million to our revenues, which was partially offset by a decrease in Bitcoin production due to having an increased network difficulty. On the other hand, Bitcoin price as of March 31, 2025, was 12% lower than as of December 31, 2024. This resulted in an unrealized fair market value loss of $510.2 million in Q1 of 2025. As a result, we reported a net loss of $533.4 million, or negative $1.55 per diluted share in the quarter compared to a net income of $337.2 million, or $1.26 per diluted share in the first quarter of last year.

Importantly, since the quarter, since the end of the quarter, we've seen a substantial recovery in the price of Bitcoin. If that strength continues or even holds steady, we expect it to have a meaningful positive impact on our second quarter results. Despite recognizing a loss in Q1 due to a quarter-end Bitcoin price of roughly $82,000 per coin, the current approximately over $100,000 per coin price would imply a fair value gain of over $800 million, approximately, thus far in Q2. Our adjusted EBITDA decreased to a loss of $483.6 million in Q1 2025 from $542.1 million in Q1 of 2024. Finally, our purchase energy cost per Bitcoin for owned mining sites was $35,728 per coin and $0.04 per kWh. Cost of revenue per petahash per day, excluding depreciation, declined 10% sequentially, despite a higher difficulty level to mine due to a higher global hash rate.

Due to our shift from an asset-light to a vertically integrated strategy, we believe we are well positioned to reduce our operating costs over time as we further expand our own initiatives. As Fred mentioned earlier, we now operate 139 MW of stranded or underutilized energy generation. Since the beginning of 2025, we have completed the acquisition of a 114 MW wind farm and fully energized our 25 MW onsite and edge compute operations at oil and natural gas fields in Texas and North Dakota. These low-cost projects are expected to further reduce our mining costs over time. With that, I'll turn it over to Stephen Glagola from Jones Trading to start our management interview. Stephen.

Stephen Glagola (Analyst)

Thank you, Fred, Salman, and Rob, for having me here today. I appreciate it. Fred, you opened your shareholder letter and prepared remarks opining on Bitcoin price action and how MARA's stock tends to trade more off-market sentiment versus fundamentals. Bitcoin is up around, I think, 9% year-to-date or so. Hash price is down 4%, but MARA is down 15%. Maybe can you just elaborate on where you see the market disconnect between your fundamentals and share performance and why you see Bitcoin price behaving less like a risk asset going forward?

Fred Thiel (Chairman and CEO)

Sorry. Let's take that into two parts. Just relative to the share price performance, it's interesting. It seems that the market values us for our Bitcoin holdings but gives us no credit for our Bitcoin mining operations. If you were to look at how some of our peers who don't have a HODL are valued, they certainly have a market valuation for their Bitcoin mining operations. We should, in theory, get the benefit of both, but that's just how the market happens to see us. They look at our big HODL and they value us that way. We personally think that the company is obviously more valuable than that. As regards to the Bitcoin price action, if you would, many people I've seen in the news lately, there's now four or five new companies that have announced that they intend to become Bitcoin treasury companies.

You've seen that the state of New Hampshire has now approved their Bitcoin strategic reserve, and they will be actually investing in Bitcoin and buying it. The state of Arizona is going to allocate Bitcoin to the Bitcoin strategic reserve that they're creating that is in the possession of state government law enforcement and others. I fully expect to see other states continue in this path of establishing strategic Bitcoin reserves. In the very near future here, we'll see the administration in Washington announce how much Bitcoin is going into the strategic reserve because I believe we're coming up on the deadline for that. I think we're starting to see continued good institutional inflows into the ETFs. We're now seeing a number that was published earlier this week or last week that showed about 9% of existing Bitcoin is now held by corporates and ETFs.

As that continues to happen, that's going to continue to drive the price of Bitcoin up. I believe that we are in a very different market regime than previous regimes where we had cycles that every four years Bitcoin would act based on halvings and miner productions. If you look at the market today, even though most miners are selling and MARA is still doing a full HODL strategy, the price of Bitcoin is moving up. There is clearly demand in excess of supply. If you think of stock-to-flow ratios, 450 new Bitcoin being emitted today, if every miner were selling Bitcoin, that would be 450 Bitcoin going into the market every day. Yet a greater number than that are being purchased every day by just a handful of players.

I think we're going to continue to see things move up in Bitcoin longer term, which is why we are still in a very much a full HODL position.

Stephen Glagola (Analyst)

Thanks. I'd like to focus, I guess, my lead questions here on your off-grid expansion strategy. First, on the types of off-grid sites MARA is prioritizing for future growth, can you elaborate on the public-private partnerships with governments and energy companies that you're currently in discussions with? Are you focusing more on flared gas or wind or other sources for new acquisitions and developments? Thanks.

Fred Thiel (Chairman and CEO)

Yeah. If you think about what I said four years ago, I think it was at the Mining Disrupt Conference in July of 2021, I said that Bitcoin miners are going to have to partner with energy companies or energy companies were going to own them. That is because I believe that eventually grid-detached Bitcoin mining where you have a PPA and you're paying an average cost, which I believe today the average PPA for a Bitcoin miner is somewhere north of $0.04 a kWh, would not be tenable as you start getting out into the years of 2028 and the halving in 2032. You would have to partner with energy companies and find a different way to structure the business. Without divulging details, we are very much executing on that vision of partnering with energy companies.

If you look at the Duke University study that was recently done, they published statistics basically saying that while the AI industry needs somewhere in excess of 40 GW of power to deploy their growth plans, the US energy grid has in excess of 70 GW available if the load is willing to be flexible by a small percentage, which currently the AI industry is not. We believe that by bringing solutions for load balancing to the AI industry that will enable AI data centers to co-locate with Bitcoin miners where Bitcoin miners provide the flexible load that enables AI data centers to operate as a flexible load on their grid, this will open up huge amounts of power to the AI industry. As we start shifting to inference or what is now more being called agentic AI, those types of data centers do not need 500, 600, 700 MW.

They need less than five. They need less than 50. These are much smaller data centers located in closer proximity to the customers that are operating them, primarily private cloud operations, near-prem or on-prem. We believe that the future of energy is about partnering with energy companies where we can help them monetize every stranded electron or every underutilized electron. If you look in markets like the Middle East, for example, when we started working in UAE, in the wintertime, they had upwards of 3 GW of excess power available. In the summertime, that dropped fairly dramatically. Since then, they have continued to add energy generating capacity. If you look at Saudi Arabia, they likely have 4 GW-5 GW of excess energy capacity today that could be made available and monetized and used. If you look in Europe, you have a similar situation.

While people read in headlines about Spain and Portugal going offline due to grid instability issues, they have built out huge amounts of renewable energy, which is not really selling energy during a great portion of the year. Those are all electrons that are going underutilized. Our focus is to work together with energy companies, work together with sovereigns and government entities to take advantage of all of those underutilized electrons by structuring business relationships that enable us to partner with them on a long-term basis to build, operate, and manage essentially flexible loads that can help monetize that stranded energy. As you look at the mix, what you're going to find is a mix of thermal, a mix of wind, solar, and some flare gas. It really depends on the market and the partner.

We're in discussions with some of the largest energy companies in the world that have a mix of all those energy sources and nuclear. Their concern is one of how do they balance load on a grid, how do they deploy flexible base load, and how do they monetize from behind the meter at renewable sites the electrons they can't sell today. You'll continue to see a broad mix of energy generating assets. In regards to flare gas, there are a lot of gas assets around the world that are very applicable to this method.

What I think you'll see us doing more and more in the future is as we continue to work with especially oil and gas producers, you'll see chunks of this flare gas type generation come online in different parts of the world where we're able to deploy our Bitcoin mining operations as a way to monetize that stranded gas. We're super excited about those opportunities. I think the message here is expect us to grow aggressively in partnership with these public and private entities across the world. As you may recall, one of our stated goals was to grow our international business such that we had about a 50/50 mix between U.S. and international. We'll continue to do that.

We believe that is a great way of delivering on growing U.S. hash rate because even though we operate outside the U.S., it does not mean we will not be pointing that hash rate back to U.S.-controlled pools. We are very excited about being able to contribute to U.S. global mining share growth across all the countries that we mine in.

Stephen Glagola (Analyst)

Thanks, Fred. Any guidance on the timeline of when we should expect those partnerships to start coming to fruition? Is that over the course of 2025 starting, or is that I know it is a three-year target that you are looking at, but just any context you could provide there?

Fred Thiel (Chairman and CEO)

We purposely not wanted to guide to excess hash numbers because what that does is causes the market to look at us chasing a specific number and delivering on a certain time. When you're working with these large government and energy majors, things can take longer than one thinks. I think what I can say, though, is that you will see good progress this year and some announcements that will give an indication of the potential of what's going to happen over the next few years. I think you'll see us showing up at events and places where other miners normally wouldn't be as we talk to these partners.

Stephen Glagola (Analyst)

Thank you. Maybe this one for Salman or Fred, whoever wants to take it. MARA reported a hash cost of $0.0285 per TH in Q1, and that, I think, marks four consecutive quarters of sequential improvement. As you continue to expand this off-grid power capacity, how do you expect this to impact your hash cost position over the next three years?

Fred Thiel (Chairman and CEO)

Salman, you want to take that?

Salman Khan (CFO)

Yes. Sure. So Stephen, as you mentioned, we have sequentially reduced our hash cost, and our eyes have been fixated on capital and operational efficiencies. That result is showing up in our historical P&L. As we have stated in the past, we expect our hash cost to continue to decline over a period of time. Those are as a result of actionable projects that we have worked on, some of those that you have seen publicly announced and others, as Fred mentioned, are in the pipeline. As we move forward from here, we expect the Bitcoin mining to be this sector, every four years, there is a halving event that happens, and the expectation is the Bitcoin price is going to go up. We are building our company in a position where we do not have to rely on the Bitcoin price or cash price to continue to go up.

We expect it to go up, and we expect it to create significant value for us. We are prepared for the downside situation. That is why it is very important for us to be sourcing megawatts that are closer to the low-cost environment. For example, the two announcements that we had in Q1, the 139 MW generation of electricity from our own source, one of them is the wind farm in Texas. That is about a 114 MW plant, and that results in a significant reduction in our cost because we consume electricity during the time when the wind blows and when the grid is congested. The grid loves that because we are able to decongest the grid while hashing at the peak hours, and we do not have to mine when the electricity is expensive. That is the kind of model that helps us drive our costs down.

One point that I want to mention is that while the sector is focused on specific KPIs, for example, some companies, some of our peers are very focused on joules per terahash. Some of them are very focused on uptime. No doubt that these are important metrics, but you have to view what value does that create for your stockholders. Our focus is the value creation for our stockholders. The uptime could be compromised for that. The joules per terahash could be lower depending on the pricing where you get there, as long as it creates the most value for our stockholders. That is where our eyes are focused on, and that is exactly what we believe is going to drive our cash cost further down from here.

Stephen Glagola (Analyst)

Yeah. Great. Thank you.

Fred Thiel (Chairman and CEO)

You can think of it as when you have your own generation and your energy price is substantially lower than $0.02 or $0.03 per kWh, then all of a sudden, it opens up the ability to use maybe slightly less efficient machines, as Salman said. If we're able to deprecate machines that have already been fully depreciated from our grid attached sites and reuse those behind the meter at these intermittent sites, your hash cost drops very significantly. You do not have the need to operate 99% of uptime because the machines are already depreciated, and so they've already been paid for. Every kilowatt hour you can operate, especially that you can operate at these low power costs, is a profitable hour.

We believe that over time, as we continue to grow this fleet of what we call our AARP fleet or advanced ASIC replacement fleet or retirement fleet, that will have a very positive impact on the overall hash cost going forward. It also gives us a secondary advantage, which is if you're only doing grid attached like some of our peers do, every three or four years, you have to replace your fleet to stay competitive because you're paying a fixed price PPA, and potentially even that energy cost is going up due to demand on the grid. You sell off those machines and you buy new machines. By being able to retire our machines into a graceful program of retirement at these behind-the-meter sites, our hash rate isn't decreased in the same way that our peers is where they're having to do net-zero replacements.

We're able to maintain a certain amount of hash rate and buy incremental hash rate to add that. It also gives us the ability to even buy other people's retired machines. If you can buy a machine that is only a third less efficient than a state-of-the-art machine, but you're only going to pay a third of the price for it, that's actually very beneficial. We believe this is the right strategy going forward as we continue to scale.

Stephen Glagola (Analyst)

Thank you. Can you address sort of the concerns that lower hash costs for the off-grid mining may be offset by trade-offs like reduced, and you kind of touched on this, reduced rig uptime, higher operational expenses, and elevated capital expenditures? Sort of maybe how do you see the IRR for off-grid Bitcoin mining sites compared to grid-connected sites? I know you touched on some of the economics of the wind farm in the shareholder letter, so maybe just elaborate on that.

Fred Thiel (Chairman and CEO)

Yeah. So I think if you look at in the case of the wind farm, for example, the infrastructure cost, as stated in the shareholder letters, I think about $150,000 to $160,000 per MW, which is substantially less than what you would be paying in a traditional grid attached because we're able to use these, let's just call it retired infrastructure, meaning miners and containers, etc. When you marry that with at a wind farm, you don't have an input cost for your energy. At a wind farm, your energy cost marginally is, just to put a number out there, say, $0.01 per kWh for your O&M, that essentially gives you best-in-class operating cost when you look at the minimal cost of the infrastructure and the power cost. If you can operate 60% of the time, that's a great opportunity right there.

If you can operate 70% of the time, it's amazing. Some of these wind assets have fairly good uptime, which allows you to operate that way. In the case of the flare gas, you're operating 24/7 at very low cost. Those types of sites are, again, very profitable. As you go to these public-private partnerships, you can operate intermittently, especially if the price of energy that you're paying is similar to that of a wind farm or a flare gas site. We believe that this concept of Bitcoin going from being a 99% uptime operation to becoming more of an intermittent operation that's able to shape load to meet the demands of the energy companies, you become a very attractive partner for the energy companies. It also requires that you have systems that allow you to shape your load to the energy company's supply.

That has been a big focus of our technology team over the past year.

Stephen Glagola (Analyst)

Thanks, Fred.

Salman Khan (CFO)

Just to add to that, the AARP program that we talked about earlier, the IRRs for those are significantly higher than a traditional model. Even with the depressed hash price assumption, we expect the IRRs to be in the range of 30-40%. This is the depressed price environment on the hash price, so very conservative. When it comes to the cost per coin or energy cost, you think about, Fred mentioned, electricity costs about $40 per MWh, all-in cost probably $50-$55 per MWh for traditional Bitcoin mining out there today. For the AARP program, we expect that to be approximately all-in cost, operating cost, around $10 per MWh.

As you can see, we're systematically going into the direction of going closer to the lower-cost operations that will drive our cost further down from here, as we had talked about previously.

Stephen Glagola (Analyst)

Thanks, Salman. I want to turn to AI real quick and the 2PIC. I mean, can you maybe share more early market feedback from your 30 MW 2PIC immersion pilot project and what is going on there? What specific revenue opportunities do you see emerging from commercial deployments of 2PIC and AI data centers?

Fred Thiel (Chairman and CEO)

Sure. The 2PIC deployments we've done to date have been done with Bitcoin mining operations. That's kind of an ideal way to ring out any bugs, if you would, of these systems. What we're finding there is that we have an ability to substantially overclock systems. If you think of it this way, if you need 100 miners operating at nameplate capacity to essentially operate a site and you have the ability to overclock them by 50%, it means you could reduce the number of miners you actually have to buy by a third. Miners being one of the most expensive components in a deployment, that CapEx savings is substantial. The savings significantly outweighs any marginal increase in cost of the two-phase immersion costs. In AI, it's even more that way because of your ability to overclock your GPUs.

As you start moving to 1 kW chips in AI, you have to move to new types of cooling technology. We are specifically designing two-phase liquid cold plate technology, which is a plug-in replacement essentially to existing solutions today. That way, we will have a cooling technology that helps people deploying AI to transition from rack-mount systems over time to two-phase liquid immersion technology. They will be able to begin using our liquid cold plate solutions today to lower the cost of their cooling. We do not use water in our systems, so we are environmentally friendlier in those spaces. We fully expect to see some really exciting opportunities there.

We're currently deploying, getting ready to deploy pilots with multiple compute OEMs on the AI side, testing solutions across a broad set of applications and configurations such that we're able to really characterize the benefits for each of these OEMs. In the AI market, we believe the key thing is to partner with the compute OEMs such that they use you as the reference of what people should use for cooling. It dramatically decreases the sales friction and dramatically increases the potential demand for the product. 2PIC is only one of the many solutions we intend to bring to the AI and digital infrastructure market. Over time, it's our intention to deploy a broader swath of solutions and services to them such that they can leverage things like our power management capabilities, orchestration, and other things. We're very excited about what this market is going to bring.

We think 2PIC and our liquid cold plate solutions are a great market entry vehicle for us as the AI technology industry continues to develop and as they advance into hotter and hotter processors.

Stephen Glagola (Analyst)

Thanks, Fred. I want to touch on a couple of things here. I know we have some limited time, but one, I mean, maybe just wrapping it all together. You recently did the Auradine Series C funding round. I was wondering if you can maybe, if you can disclose your ownership stake there and if you're interested in pursuing a majority position or potential vertical integration in the future. One. Around this, maybe just talk about how the tariffs imposed by the Trump administration are impacting procuring mining rigs. I think you spent about $136 million in CapEx in Q1. It's split roughly 70/30 between rigs and infrastructure. Maybe just if you can combine all that into one. Thank you.

Fred Thiel (Chairman and CEO)

Sure. As it relates to Auradine, we own a little under 15% of the company today. One of the reasons we were very involved in founding the company was because developing semiconductors is very expensive, and we felt it would be best done leveraging institutional investment dollars. Today, the investors in Auradine include people like Mayfield, Celesta, Samsung, and many others. One of the board members that serves together with me on Auradine's board is Lip-Bu, the CEO of Intel. Auradine is very focused on solutions outside of Bitcoin mining as well.

The Bitcoin mining chip, which we're the predominant customer of, is amazing, very power-efficient, and has a set of features that allow us to do all sorts of very special things in relation to dealing with the energy efficiency and how the chip operates towards a set target, whether that be hash rate, energy efficiency, or maximum Bitcoin production. Other things that Auradine are doing relate to, which they've announced, relate to AI infrastructure technology around network switches, which is a super exciting product. Auradine has already spun off an AI security technology business. If they keep doing the great job that they're doing, it's going to be a very valuable investment for MARA to have. It is not something we'll make captive anytime soon. It just doesn't make sense for us.

As you look at other aspects of tariffs and things like that, as we mentioned in the shareholder letter, we've now begun manufacturing our own miners. Obviously, we've been working to develop a supply chain around that that enables us to optimize and have agility, if you would, in what we're doing such that we're minimizing as much as we possibly can the impact of tariffs. If you think about a miner, the vast majority of the cost of a Bitcoin miner are the ASICs. Again, the relationship we have with Auradine gives us the opportunity to keep our costs down and control the supply chain such that we can ensure our own supply, but more importantly, we can minimize the impact of tariffs. As it relates to the infrastructure that we use, it is going to have an impact, obviously.

Steel, metal, things that you use to do containerized solutions are impacted by tariffs. I think we'll be impacted in that area the same as anybody else would. We have a very strong supply chain team that work for us. Especially with 2PIC and building our own technology solutions around containerization infrastructure, we're going to optimize on a continual basis according to how tariffs go. My personal belief is that I think we'll see trade deals announced on kind of a continual basis here over the next months that will ameliorate a lot of the concerns for industries. I think that there will continue to be a challenge with tariffs related to China. I think that the more that you can source outside of China, the better things will be.

Lastly, on the topic of tariffs, as we continue to grow our business outside of the U.S., that's a very different tariff picture when you're buying miners or you're buying infrastructure and you're having that delivered somewhere outside the U.S.

Stephen Glagola (Analyst)

Thanks, Fred. In March, MARA established a new $2 billion at-the-market equity facility. I was hoping you could discuss sort of the strategic rationale for choosing an ATM program over taking on maybe additional leverage and outline your priorities for deploying these funds in 2025 and beyond.

Fred Thiel (Chairman and CEO)

Martin, you want to take that?

Salman Khan (CFO)

Stephen, when you think, yeah, sure. When you think about the source of capital for this sector and for MARA in general, it's been predominantly ATM-dependent over the last few years with some converts. In our history, we have done some converts back in 2021 and put some leverage on the balance sheet and bought Bitcoin. We also did the 0% coupon last year to buy Bitcoin, as you remember, in the Q3, Q4 timeframe. Our usage last year for the ATM was less than 50% of our total source of capital as a result of that. When we look at our capital profile and our sources of capital with the growth plans, we look at what are the best source of cash and source of raising capital for that and responsibly look at the opportunities to raise the capital.

We are not in the market every day. We opportunistically look at there are some very specific KPI-driven capital-raise program that we have instituted over the last few years, and that has worked out well for us. Now, when we think about raising capital, the capital has to be deployed in accretive projects. That is why our threshold has been very high in terms of how do we allocate our capital and what kind of rate of returns do we expect. As we had talked about a few moments ago, the projects that we would expect to see in future are going to squeeze more value out of the same investment that we had done in the past. The other thing that we have been focused on is another KPI, which is return on capital employed. Yes, quarter over quarter, it can fluctuate depending on the Bitcoin price.

When you look at it on a long-term perspective, it is one of the most healthy in the sector. We take pride in that, but not only that, we keep an eye on that as to when we invest our capital and utilize it, we have prudent balance sheet management and preserve our flexibility with the sources of capital available.

Stephen Glagola (Analyst)

Thanks, Holland. Last one for me. You have that full HODL approach, that is your Bitcoin treasury policy that you adopted in July of 2024. You have seen other kind of miners in the market now starting to liquidate Bitcoin that is mined and so forth. Do you plan to sort of maintain the strategy through 2025 and beyond? What factors or market dynamics might prompt MARA to reconsider or sell some of its monthly production?

Salman Khan (CFO)

Yeah. I mean, when you think about MARA, so the distinguishing feature that MARA versus investors have opportunities is to invest in either a Bitcoin HODLer who is going out and buying Bitcoin from the open market at the spot price, which, by the way, is right now $103,000, or people like to invest in miners like us who are pure-play miners and they have, for example, our cost per coin is one of the lowest in the sector. So any upside from the cost per coin to the Bitcoin price, our stockholders benefit from that as the bull price kicks in. What MARA is doing is a twin turbocharge strategy, if you like, right? If you're a car owner, you would know that if you drive a base model or if you drive a single turbo engine, there are differences.

When you drive a twin turbo engine, you see the benefit of both the sides. That portfolio approach across the board is really attractive in our humble view from a long-term perspective. We expect that to pay off our stockholders from a long-term perspective as the Bitcoin price increases from here. Going back to the HODL approach, last year, we went on full HODL strategy. We looked at the market conditions. We looked at the political tailwinds and the macros. It made a lot of sense to go out and HODL, and we accumulated that Bitcoin that we have not sold. We also went out and bought Bitcoin by doing converts, 0% coupon converts last year. That was the best use of our capital at that point in time.

Now, we are not, as you noticed, that we are primarily a Bitcoin miner, but at the same time, our stockholders benefit from the HODL, the second largest HODL worldwide, and as far as we know, at over 48,000 coins today.

Stephen Glagola (Analyst)

Thank you, guys, very much. Appreciate it.

Salman Khan (CFO)

Thank you.

Robert Samuels (VP of Investor Relations)

Thanks, Steve. Appreciate the questions. We're going to pass on taking retail questions today as most of them are already addressed on today's call. Thanks, everyone, again, for joining us. If you have questions that were not answered during today's call, please feel free to contact our investor relations team at [email protected]. Thank you very much, and enjoy the rest of the day.

Moderator (participant)

Thank you. This does conclude today's conference. We thank you for your participation. You may disconnect your lines at this time and have a wonderful day.