MARA Holdings has finalized a deal to purchase a majority stake in French computing infrastructure operator Exaion, significantly strengthening its ambitions beyond cryptocurrency mining and into broader artificial intelligence and cloud-based services markets.
The agreement, originally reached in August 2025 with EDF Pulse Ventures, grants MARA France a 64% ownership position after regulators approved the transaction and cleared all necessary legal conditions.
French energy company EDF will remain a minority shareholder while continuing to act as a commercial customer of the computing infrastructure business following the ownership restructuring.
Telecom entrepreneur Xavier Niel’s investment firm NJJ Capital will simultaneously acquire a 10% stake in MARA France, creating a wider alliance between energy, telecom and computing infrastructure partners across Europe.
Governance will change to reflect the new structure, with Exaion’s board including three representatives from MARA, three from EDF Pulse Ventures, one from NJJ, plus the company’s chief executive and co-founder.
Both Xavier Niel and MARA chief executive Fred Thiel will personally sit on the board as part of the cooperative arrangement.
Bitcoin Miners Move Toward Ai Revenue
The acquisition comes during a wider industry shift in which Bitcoin mining companies are aggressively pivoting toward AI infrastructure and high-performance computing services as traditional mining economics face pressure from rising costs and falling margins.
After the 2024 halving reduced block rewards and increased competition on the network, many publicly traded miners adopted hybrid business strategies combining mining cash flow with steadier enterprise computing income.
Companies including TeraWulf, Hut 8, IREN and MARA have been repurposing existing mining facilities and electrical capacity into data centers capable of hosting AI workloads for corporate customers.
HIVE Digital Technologies has already reported resilient financial performance despite weaker Bitcoin prices, supported by growing demand for its artificial intelligence services business operations.
Meanwhile, CleanSpark previously announced plans to raise over one billion dollars to expand both mining capacity and data center infrastructure simultaneously.
Difficulty Increase Adds Pressure
The timing also coincides with rising technical pressure in Bitcoin mining, as network difficulty jumped approximately 15% to 144.4 trillion, increasing the computing effort required to produce new blocks.
The increase reversed an earlier drop triggered by severe winter storms in the United States that temporarily knocked miners offline and sharply reduced global hash rate.
Although higher difficulty improves network security, it reduces profitability and reinforces incentives for miners to diversify toward artificial intelligence services and computing infrastructure revenue streams.
