MARA Holdings, the bitcoin miner formerly known as Marathon Digital, cut approximately 15 percent of its roughly 266 full-time employees across rounds on Wednesday and Thursday of the week ending April 3, 2026. Departures affected roles across the company. Severance included one month of paid leave through April 30, 13 weeks of severance pay, and accrued PTO.
CEO Fred Thiel explained the decision as a strategic pivot rather than a retrenchment: "As we've been sharing through our recent announcements with Starwood and Exaion, we're focusing the company in a new direction."
The cuts came days after MARA completed a major balance sheet restructuring, selling 15,133 bitcoin for approximately $1.1 billion between March 4 and March 25 to reduce debt. The company reported a $1.3 billion annual loss.
The strategic rationale is MARA's repositioning from pure bitcoin mining to AI and high-performance compute infrastructure. A deal with Starwood will repurpose roughly one gigawatt of mining capacity for AI workloads. In February 2026, MARA acquired a majority stake in Exaion, the data center subsidiary of French energy utility EDF.
This fits a broader pattern across the crypto mining sector. Core Scientific, Hut 8, IREN, and TeraWulf have all moved in the same direction, positioning their low-cost power contracts and existing data center footprint as AI compute assets. When the bitcoin price falls or energy costs rise, the AI pivot becomes the business. When it rises, mining becomes the business. The underlying asset is the power contract, not the protocol.