• MARA CEO Fred Thiel said enterprise customers are seeking direct access to data centers due to cost and control
• Exaion investment offers growth opportunity in Europe amid data sovereignty concerns

MARA Holdings CEO Fred Thiel said a growing number of enterprise AI customers are starting to bypass neocloud intermediaries and go directly to data center operators, a shift he said is creating demand for everything from 5 MW private cloud deployments to multi-hundred-megawatt campuses.

Speaking at TD Cowen’s technology, media and telecom conference last week, Thiel said large financial institutions and trading firms are increasingly seeking dedicated infrastructure rather than renting AI capacity through third-party providers.

“They are disintermediating the neoclouds,” he said, adding that some customers are now asking for “X hundreds of MW” of data center capacity, while other enterprises are looking for 30 MW, 40 MW or 50 MW of load.

In his view, the broader enterprise market will likely center on roughly 5 MW to 25 MW deployments, especially for private cloud environments where customers want tighter control over data, latency and cost.

Thiel said renting dedicated AI infrastructure from a major cloud provider can cost about 10 times as much as operating it independently, he said, while many enterprise workloads do not require the newest, most expensive GPUs. He said older generation NVIDIA technology can often support core enterprise AI tasks at a fraction of the cost, making private or dedicated cloud models increasingly attractive.

He also described the ongoing competitive scramble among silicon providers for access to power. NVIDIA, AMD and large customers with their own chips are all trying to control scarce energized capacity, Thiel said, because no chip vendor can sell more accelerators if customers have nowhere to plug them in.

Silicon companies have so far acted as credit backstops for neocloud customers. However, they are increasingly moving to lock up capacity directly themselves, he said.

Thiel said that dynamic could eventually create partnership opportunities for MARA at smaller sites, where silicon vendors might bring the compute while MARA provides and operates the infrastructure. For now, though, he said MARA sees the best near-term returns in leasing power-rich sites rather than owning GPUs itself.

Internationally, Thiel highlighted MARA’s investment in Exaion, a France-based operator backed in part by EDF, as a way to tap European demand for sovereign and private AI cloud services. He said European and Canadian customers are increasingly wary of relying on US cloud providers because of data sovereignty concerns and the reach of the US CLOUD Act, particularly in defense, healthcare and finance.

MARA agreed in April to acquire the 505 MW Long Ridge gas-fired plant in Hannibal, Ohio for USD 1.5bn including assumed debt, a deal Thiel said would help lift MARA’s available portfolio above 2 GW and support a build-out toward 600 gross MW of AI and critical IT load by 2030.