BTC, Crypto, stocks and options trader, political troll, fantasy football junkie, OIF Army Vet.
sell side
Joined January 2021
- Tweets19.9K
- Following460
- Followers2.1K
- Likes18.9K
Who is $MARA's mystery customer?
Start with what they told us already
Fred Thiel: "I need to think about the 15-year credit worthiness of somebody during the life cycle of that lease... they have to still be in business in 15 years. So we're being very picky about who we sign up"
Fred again: "it's about financeability of the tenant… The advantage we have with the Starwood partnership is they credit wrap these deals for us"
Barry Sternlicht, Starwood, on the MARA JV: "We do have unbelievable tenant interest in the properties… we've only done deals with the hyperscalers"
They said this back in the summer, months before credit became the main thing the market wants to talk about
And it's in writing. The MARA / Starwood agreement targets "investment grade hyperscalers" or tenants backed by "investment grade sources for the length of the applicable lease term"
The Q3 10-Q on Long Ridge: "formal indications of interest from prospective investment-grade hyperscale tenants"
This isn't a startup chasing cheap power. It's a balance sheet built to carry a 15 to 20 year lease.
Then Fred at Cantor: "if I were to give more details... it would become very evident who the tenant is"
That's a name everyone knows.
And the holdup? "From one person's desk to another person's desk." No power issue. No permit issue. Just paperwork moving at a giant company.
So I ran the odds. These are my speculative estimates of WHO they sign, once a lease lands:
◆ Google 22%
◆ Amazon/AWS 21.5%
◆ Meta 16%
◆ Microsoft 14%
◆ Anthropic 8.5%
◆ Oracle/OpenAI 5.5%
◆ Neoclouds 3%
◆ xAI 1%
◆ Sovereign 1%
◆ Other 7.5%
GOOGLE (22% odds)
◆ Investment-grade balance sheet that can carry a 15 to 20 year lease on its own, exactly what Fred and Barry say they want
◆ Nebraska's own data center report lists Google sites in Lincoln, Papillion/Springfield and Omaha
◆ Google and Tenaska proposed a 1-3 GW gas-fired data center in Nebraska
◆ Fred named Google as a Starwood customer
◆ Already backstops AI tenants' leases at miners (Fluidstack)
AMAZON/AWS (21.5% odds)
◆ The only hyperscaler with a documented Starwood project: Amazon Data Services at Starwood's Herndon, VA park
◆ The firm that ran that park for Starwood is the owner's rep at Kearney
◆ A ~$23.8 Billion Ohio plan
◆ Signed a 300 MW lease with Cipher in 2025
◆ Top-tier credit, the kind that fits a 15 to 20 year lease
META (16% odds)
◆ The biggest data center owner in Nebraska (Sarpy campus)
◆ Building gas-powered AI in Ohio with the ~1 GW Prometheus campus
◆ Signed a 175 MW miner lease with CleanSpark this year
MICROSOFT (14% odds)
◆ Fred named Microsoft as a Starwood customer
◆ A heavy third-party leaser (IREN, Nscale)
◆ Walked away from a UK site in October over a power delay. Powered sites are what it wants, and that's MARA's advantage
ANTHROPIC (8.5% odds)
◆ The most active miner tenant of 2026 (TeraWulf, Riot)
◆ Has a 20-year lease at TeraWulf's Hawesville, KY site, a former aluminum smelter on the Ohio River. Long Ridge's data center goes on a former smelter site on the Ohio River too
◆ Still in play, but not investment grade yet. Its IPO filing says it relies on partners that guarantee its lease obligations, the same partners whose chips go in the building. Fred put it simply: "their silicon provider has to backstop them." That points to Google, which has already done exactly that at other miners, or Nvidia
THE LONG SHOTS (8.5% odds)
◆ Oracle/OpenAI (5.5%): investment grade, but both Fred and Barry flagged credit concerns
◆ Neoclouds (3%): Barry said Starwood has done no data center work with neoscalers or CoreWeave
THE BIG TWO
Put Google and Amazon together and that's 43.5% of the odds. At Kearney it's 51%. Both check nearly every box: investment-grade credit for a 15 to 20 year lease, history with Starwood, and a footprint in these regions.
Now look at what's ready for them.
KEARNEY, NE (Project Horizon)
◆ Permit approved 5-0 by City Council on Sep 8
◆ 100 MW Phase 1 on existing power, scaling to 368 MW
◆ Construction planned for Nov-Dec 2026
◆ Phase 1 targeted to be operating by about March 2028
LONG RIDGE, OH (Hannibal)
◆ FERC approved the acquisition on Nov 4, with closing expected "in the coming weeks"
◆ ~500 MW gas plant already running
◆ "Line of sight to up to 600 Gross MW of AI and Critical IT Loads"
◆ 200 MW of grid power plus 200 MW behind the meter, building toward "around a gigawatt"
◆ In service targeted for mid-2028
Two powered sites. One credit filter. And that filter points straight at the biggest balance sheets on earth.
The odds say it's a name you already know. The pieces say it's closer than the market thinks.
Who's your pick?
NFA / DYOR
$GOOGL $AMZN $META $MSFT $ANT $NVDA
Navinder retweeted
Yesterday $MARA CEO Fred Thiel sat on a panel at Cantor Convergence called "Conversion is Inevitable: The Path to AI Infrastructure"
I went through every minute of it. Here are Fred's key quotes, and what I think he's telling us
◆ THE LEASES
Cantor asked straight up about the "two by year end" from the earnings call. Fred:
"The only reason we're sitting waiting for the tenant to sign the lease is, in a couple of cases, there's some internal delays"
"Sometimes it needs to go from one person's desk to another person's desk and that person has to sign it"
"Nothing permit-wise or power-wise"
"No technical issues"
Then the line that matters most:
"If I were to give more details, as regards one lease, it would become very evident who the tenant is"
Read that again. If the details alone would give the tenant away, this is a name you would recognize. Small startups don't have a paper trail that long between desks. Big organizations do
◆ THE PHONE IS RINGING
"Since the election we have gotten a lot more phone calls"
Anything with power and a clear path to permitting is "very interesting regardless of size"
MARA has power in hand. The buyers have to come to the people who have it
◆ WHY STARWOOD
Hyperscalers are "spending 90% fixing problems with first time developers"
"That's one of the reasons we did the Starwood deal. They've done deals with Google, Microsoft, Amazon. They've built 7 to 8 gigawatts of capacity for them. They operate it"
Nobody picks a partner with that track record to chase small tenants. You pick that partner because you're building for the biggest names in the room
◆ THE URGENCY
"There was a bit of an oh shit moment. People need capacity to come online next year"
Capacity next year means power this year. Power is exactly what MARA has
◆ KEARNEY, NEBRASKA: THE MATH
Fred called these numbers illustrative:
- 100 MW site, contributed at about $1 Million a MW
- Starwood matched with $100 Million
- $15 Million per MW build cost, $1.5 Billion total
- $300 Million of equity total. Each side has put in $100 Million and adds $50 Million more
"Talk about capital light"
A $1.5 Billion AI campus for roughly $150 Million of MARA cash. That's the setup the Street keeps missing
◆ THE RIOT COMPARISON
Asked about Riot's concrete-pad deal, Fred went right at the math:
"33% yield on a $6 million build cost is essentially the same as 15%, 17% yield on cost on a $12 million build cost, or what a hyperscaler is going to pay you on a $20 million per megawatt build cost"
"Step away from yield on cost and look at what the real NOI is"
Then he asked out loud whether Riot, with 900 MW at Corsicana, could have gotten a better deal from a hyperscaler
Translation: MARA isn't racing to sign the first lease offered. They're holding out for the deal that pays the most on what's actually earned
◆ EXAION
Built inside EDF to run the data centers at its nuclear sites. When EDF wouldn't put in more capital, MARA stepped in and recapitalized it
The first announced client is "a very sophisticated model builder" going from signing to online in "a few months," running prior-generation GPUs
"Good profitability, very attractive pricing... great relationships with both NVIDIA and other providers"
◆ THE CLOSE
"Demand is outstripping the capacity. Capacity can't come online fast enough"
Fred cited agentic token usage up eightfold since August
Then he said more companies are moving to open-weight models on their own private cloud, and that "the bare metal business has to convert to private cloud business"
Stop there for a second
Private cloud with its own orchestration layer is exactly what Fred said Exaion does. He may have just described where the whole industry is heading, and MARA already owns a piece of it
◆ PUTTING IT TOGETHER
Power in hand
A partner that builds for Google, Microsoft and Amazon
A tenant so recognizable he can't say more
A private cloud operator ready for where AI is going next
A balance sheet that's already cleaned up
Demand is outstripping capacity, and @MARA is sitting on the capacity
The first signature is the spark
NFA / DYOR
$MARA on LinkedIn:
"The market for AI infrastructure is applying a higher standard. This week at Cantor Convergence in Miami, Chairman and CEO Fred Thiel joins the panel 'Conversion is Inevitable: The Path to AI Infrastructure' to discuss what it takes to meet it."
Read that panel title again. Conversion is INEVITABLE.
Not "exploring." Not "optionality."
That higher standard is exactly what the market has been asking for, and MARA has been checking the boxes:
• Balance sheet cleaned up, every BTC-backed loan repaid
• FERC approval for Long Ridge
• City Council approval for Kearney
• Starwood Digital Ventures on the build
The one box left is a signed lease. That's what I'll be listening for from Fred in Miami.
NFA / DYOR
Navinder retweeted
Everyone roasted $MARA for selling Bitcoin.
August: BTC ~$64K. MARA needs $750M for Long Ridge. It doesn't sell the lows. It borrows against the stack.
After Q3: it sells 13,597 BTC at an average of $81,039. $1.1B in. Loans repaid in full. 17,477 BTC of collateral released.
Today: BTC ~$72.5K. Those same coins would fetch ~$115M less.
The part most people skip: on Sept 30, 57% of MARA's Bitcoin was loaned or pledged, on loans that demanded more collateral if BTC fell. Now it's under 5%.
They sold 10% higher AND took the margin clock off the table right before the drop.
What's left:
• ~20.4K BTC, almost all unencumbered
• Debt down $1.4B this year
• $500M buyback authorized
• Long Ridge (485 MW) cleared by FERC, closing in weeks
Next test: two AI leases. That's the whole story now.
Navinder retweeted
Strip out the servers/GPUs and BofA Research pegs a data center at ~$11.3M per MW
Now look at how much of that the $MARA ecosystem can already cover in-house 👇
✅ COVERED (~$6.2M/MW, ~55%)
• Networking $4.8M: Upscale AI's SkyFabriX switch silicon + Velaura's AuraLinks fabric. The single biggest line on the chart
• Construction $0.9M: Starwood Digital Ventures leads the build
• Engineering $0.5M: SDV designs it, Exaion could run it
🔄 SOURCED FROM PARTNERS (~$5.1M/MW)
• Generators $1.1M
• UPS $1.1M
• Switchgear $0.8M
• Liquid cooling $0.6M
• Air cooling $0.5M
• Power distribution $0.5M
• Chillers $0.4M
• Cooling towers $0.1M
Years of investments (MARA's stake in Velaura AI and its spin-offs like Upscale AI), patents, products and partnerships have quietly built a stack where ~55% of the cost per MW stays in house on any MARA / SDV build, if they run their own gear over the tenant's picks
🎁 BONUS: Velaura's Titan Core is chip IP that Velaura AI says cuts AI accelerator power 2-4x. If customers opt for it inside their servers, that's more compute per MW on top of the savings above
The vendors on this chart get paid either way. MARA is positioned to keep more of it.
NFA / DYOR
Navinder retweeted
$MARA just dropped one of its most important updates of the year.
-MARA authorized a $500 MILLION share buyback, and I LOVE seeing this with the stock trading at such a discount
-Tenant discussions are now in advanced stages across nearly all of its sites, with MARA targeting TWO AI/HPC leases before the end of the year
-MARA secured rights to develop up to 2 GW of power in Matagorda, which could take its power portfolio from roughly 1 GW today to more than 4 GW
-Long Ridge received FERC approval, bringing MARA closer to owning a 505 MW natural gas plant, 1,600+ acres, and more than 1 GW of total potential capacity at the site
-Exaion signed a $79 MILLION GPU-as-a-service contract on 100% take-or-pay terms, while its pipeline has grown to more than $3 BILLION
-MARA has reduced total debt by 37% this year and now has less than 5% of its Bitcoin holdings loaned or pledged
-MARA spent years assembling power, land, interconnections, and compute. Now the story changes from how many megawatts they control to how much revenue they can generate from each one.
This is exactly what I wanted to see.
Navinder retweeted
$MARA
>BTC price-driven beat
>Revenue miss on weather-related downturn in certain sites
>"Still targeting two leases before year-end...but timing could slip into next year"
>Sold BTC and paid back $750M in debt
>New $500M stock repurchase authorized
>Acquired sub Exaion signs $79M GPU-as-a-service contract with first ever customer. 100% take or pay terms. Exaion pipeline exceeds $3B