NEW YORK : MARA Holdings Inc., the world’s largest publicly traded bitcoin miner, has begun producing power in the U.S. shale patch as part of a pilot program to fuel 25 megawatts of its mining operations with excess natural gas, the company told Reuters on Tuesday.
The move comes as intensifying competition for electricity between Big Tech’s AI data centers has led the crypto industry, which is among the country’s largest single-source power consumers, to shift business strategies and either market to AI or find ways around the power fight.
“The AI guys are prepared to pay almost any price for energy because of their demand, so it makes it very hard for bitcoin miners to be able to compete,” said MARA Chief Executive Officer Fred Thiel.
Bringing cryptomining to the raw power supply allows MARA to circumvent some of the competition, Thiel said, and avoid increasingly expensive power prices from regional grids. This is also the first time MARA will own its power generation, which is rare for any miner.
Energy-intensive mining for cryptocurrencies like bitcoin has come under public scrutiny in recent years for its carbon footprint, leading to restrictions on the businesses in places like New York and prompting a federal proposal to tax the industry’s power use.
“We want to avoid putting additional load on the grid,” Thiel said. Most U.S. cryptomining, which federal agencies estimate account for as much as 2.3 per cent of total U.S. electricity consumption, buy power from the grid to run their mining rigs.
Generating power for cryptomining in areas where it would be logistically unfeasible for AI data centers, including remote shale basins and wind farms, would also provide a financial benefit for energy producers lacking pipelines or transmission lines needed to sell their supplies into established markets, Thiel said.
“We can bring energy markets to where