🚀 Core Scientific’s $30 Surge Incoming? Cantor Fitzgerald Bets Big on CoreWeave Buyout Deal

Wall Street's latest crypto-infused adrenaline rush just got a voltage boost.

From mining to moonshot?

Cantor Fitzgerald analysts are throwing gasoline on the Core Scientific rally, predicting a $30+ price target if the CoreWeave acquisition goes through. Because nothing juices a stock like hedge funds discovering 'blockchain adjacency.'

The AI-crypto arbitrage play

With CoreWeave's GPU muscle potentially repurposing mining infrastructure, this smells suspiciously like bankers finally understanding that crypto miners own the best power contracts in North America. Who needs productive assets when you've got takeout speculation?

The cynical kicker

Watch institutional FOMO hit overdrive—the same crowd that called Bitcoin a scam in 2018 now can't rebrand mining stocks fast enough as 'AI infrastructure plays.' Just don't ask about the energy bills.

The BTC - AI Pivot

But it’s not just Cantor arguing that the compute power used for crunching numbers to mine BTC might be more efficiently used for AI.

Rittenhouse Research, a new fintech and AI-focused firm, released a report in May arguing that the most successful crypto companies aren’t doubling down on bitcoin. Instead, they’re pivoting to become AI infrastructure providers.

When Galaxy Digital bought the Helios data center in late 2022, it seemed like a rescue of a struggling miner, yet it turned out to be a strategic AI asset as demand for data center space surged with the rise of ChatGPT and LLMs, Rittenhouse pointed out.

“The infrastructure used to mine digital Gold is better used to process AI algorithms,” Rittenhouse wrote at the time.

At the core of the argument is the belief that AI generates stable, long-term cash flows, unlike BTC mining, which is subject to sharp revenue drops every four years due to halvings and is heavily dependent on bitcoin’s volatile price cycles.

The future profitability of BTC mining, Rittenhouse noted, is also dependent on mining firms being able to design chips that are significantly more efficient each cycle to account for the halvening, an increasingly difficult task as gains from silicon shrinkage begin to plateau.

But Not Every Pivot Away from BTC is Successful

While Cantor, and the market broadly, is looking fondly on Core Scientific's possible pivot, not all pivots away from BTC mining have gone this well.

As CoinDesk recently reported, Bit Digital is dumping its bitcoin rigs to go all-in on ethereum staking, and the market pushed down its stock by 15% during the Thursday trading session in New York.

Canaan, once hoping to diversify into AI hardware, has now shuttered its chip unit entirely after failing to gain traction. Its stock is down nearly 75% in the last six months, and closed at 63 cents on Thursday.

But Core Scientific might have found the middle path, leveraging its mining-built footprint to tap into a $100 billion-plus AI infrastructure boom.

If Cantor’s thesis proves right, CoreWeave’s second offer for CORZ could look very different from the one they made last year, and it could mark a new blueprint for the rest of the sector.

Neither CoreWeave nor Core Scientific has publicly commented on the matter.