Marathon Digital stock falls after hosting provider bankruptcy, BTIG downgrade

Marathon Digital (NASDAQ:MARA) stock has dropped 8.8% in Friday morning trading after BTIG analyst Gregory Lewis downgraded the bitcoin miner to Neutral from Buy following news that its primary hosting provider filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.Compute North filed for Chapter 11 late Thursday, according to numerous media reports. That form of bankruptcy allows a company to restructure its debts while it continues operating.Marathon (MARA) on Thursday said the filing by one of its hosting providers "will not impact our current mining operations," in a tweet.Lewis, though, said he expects Compute North's restructuring to "weigh on MARA's ability to grow its hash capacity. However, longer term, the bankruptcy of Compute North could provide an opportunity for MARA to build a data center infrastructure footprint at distressed pricing."The analyst estimated that Compute North is expected to provide ~45% of the hosting capacity for Marathon Digital's (MARA) mid-2023 has target of ~23 exahash/second.Meanwhile, bitcoin's (BTC-USD) pricing isn't helping bitcoin miner stocks. It's off 1.7% over the past 24 hours, recently trading at ~$18.7K.Lewis's Neutral rating aligns with the Quant rating of Neutral and diverges from the average Wall Street rating and SA Author's average rating, both at Buy.