Bitcoin miner MARA Holdings sold 13,597 bitcoin after the end of the third quarter, raising around $1.1 billion. That is according to the company’s third-quarter 2026 shareholder letter, filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission on November 9. The MARA bitcoin sale stands out because of its size: measured against the 34,012 BTC MARA held at the end of September, it amounts to roughly 40 percent of its holdings. And MARA says it will keep converting bitcoin into cash.
The numbers behind the MARA bitcoin sale
According to the shareholder letter in the SEC archive, MARA sold the 13,597 BTC after quarter-end at around $81,039 per coin. Most of the proceeds went straight into paying down debt:
- MARA used $750 million to fully repay its bitcoin-collateralized term loans.
- That released 17,477 BTC that had been pledged as collateral.
- Less than 5 percent of its remaining bitcoin holdings are now loaned or pledged, MARA says.
During the third quarter itself, MARA had already sold 3,891 BTC at an average of $75,300. It mined 2,247 BTC over the same period and bought none. Doing the maths, MARA sold roughly six times as many bitcoin in the approximately six weeks after quarter-end as it produced in the entire third quarter.
Since the start of the year, MARA says it has cut $1.4 billion of debt, or 37 percent of its total debt (as of September 30). In addition, the board has authorized a share repurchase programme of up to $500 million.
Why MARA is selling
The letter’s reasoning is unusually direct. MARA intends to keep using bitcoin to build cash – among other things for AI infrastructure opportunities, to satisfy the puts on its convertible notes that become exercisable next year, and for potential share repurchases. The debt repayment, it adds, has also reduced its exposure to bitcoin price volatility.
At the same time, management stresses: “this is not a pivot away from bitcoin.” Bitcoin mining remains the operating foundation, generates cash flow and keeps energized sites productive. Bitcoin is described as a strategic asset – one that MARA may hold, partly monetize or borrow against, depending on market conditions.
The core of the new strategy is stated at the very beginning of the letter: maximize the value of every megawatt MARA controls. Mining is one option; AI and high-performance computing (HPC) data centers are another.
The AI plans in detail
What MARA can show so far is modest, but real:
- Exaion: the subsidiary, which offers private cloud, inference and GPU-as-a-service, signed a four-year, $79 million contract with its first US customer – on 100 percent take-or-pay terms, meaning the customer pays whether or not it uses the capacity.
- Pipeline: MARA cites customer demand totalling more than $3 billion in contract value, around $1 billion of it targeted for delivery by the end of 2027. The letter itself makes clear that these are indications of demand, not yet contracted or committed.
- Matagorda County, Texas: rights to a site with up to 2 gigawatts of power capacity; payments to the sellers depend on approvals and none have been made so far. MARA obtained a $100 million letter of credit for the interconnection study deposit.
- Long Ridge: the acquisition of a natural gas plant has received approval from the energy regulator FERC, with closing expected by year-end. The plant is currently authorized to sell 485 MW, rising to its full 505 MW nameplate capacity in the first half of 2027.
Then there is Vertebrai, software that shifts computing load to wherever cheap power is available. At a Texas wind farm, MARA says it cut curtailment from an estimated 46 to 22 percent of potential generation – a company figure based on the site’s own settlement data.
The quarter: a paper profit, falling revenue
The rest of the quarterly figures show how heavily MARA depends on the bitcoin price – in both directions:
- Revenue: $164.2 million, down 35 percent from the prior-year quarter ($252.4 million). The main reason, according to MARA: the average price of bitcoin mined was 37 percent lower than a year earlier, cutting revenue by $94.8 million. Higher production added back $11.7 million.
- Net income: $632.1 million, up from $123.1 million. This includes an unrealized mark-to-market gain of $885.3 million on bitcoin holdings, as the price rose 27 percent over the quarter, MARA says. Without this paper gain, the result would look considerably weaker.
- Adjusted EBITDA: $857.7 million, up from $395.6 million – also driven largely by the valuation effect.
- Operations: 71.2 EH/s of energized hashrate (up 18 percent), 644 blocks won, an average of 24.4 BTC per day. Purchased energy cost was $39,674 per bitcoin mined at owned sites.
- Liquidity: $3.8 billion in combined unrestricted cash and bitcoin, including coins loaned or pledged as collateral.
Analysis: from miner to power company with data centers
MARA is not the first miner to reshape its infrastructure toward AI. The logic is easy to follow: whoever has grid connections, sites and experience running power-hungry facilities owns exactly what AI providers are most desperate for right now. What is new at MARA is above all how consistently it is financing the shift – largely from its bitcoin holdings.
That cuts both ways. On the one hand, debt is falling, and with the collateralized loans repaid, the risk of coming under pressure when prices fall is lower. On the other hand, MARA is tying itself to a business that even the letter describes as less certain: investor sentiment toward AI infrastructure has become more cautious, it says, citing the pace of AI adoption, community opposition, higher financing costs and credit structures. How quickly such plans can change was shown recently by Microsoft winding down an Oracle deal for AI cloud capacity.
For the bitcoin market, the sale is a data point, not a shock: 13,597 BTC over six weeks is significant but spread out. The signal matters more. Large holders increasingly treat bitcoin as a source of funding rather than an asset to be held at all costs. Similar questions about miners and their hashrate came up with ETF inflows coinciding with a falling hashrate. And how closely the price tracks monetary policy was shown by the Fed rate decision in October.
Whether the bet pays off will be measured by hard contracts, not pipelines. So far there is a single AI contract worth $79 million – set against $1.1 billion from sold bitcoin. The coming quarters will show whether the megawatt portfolio really turns into the promised “contracted returns”.
