đ Core Scientific Primed for $30+ Surge as CoreWeave Buyout Buzz Hits Fever Pitch (Cantor Fitzgerald Bullish)
Bitcoin miner turned AI infrastructure play Core Scientific (CORZ) is flashing buy signals againâthis time with a potential takeover by GPU-cloud giant CoreWeave sending analysts into a frenzy.
From mining rigs to moneybags
Cantor Fitzgerald just slapped a $30+ price target on CORZ, betting heavy that CoreWeave's rumored acquisition will turbocharge the stock. Because nothing juices valuations like a hyperscaler's deep pockets meeting a crypto survivor's hustle.
The cynical angle
Wall Street's suddenly all-in on a company that was restructuring its debt last yearâproving yet again that in tech, yesterday's bankruptcy candidate is tomorrow's 'strategic asset' if you've got GPUs and a pulse.
The BTC - AI Pivot
But itâs 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 arenât doubling down on bitcoin. Instead, theyâre 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.
âThe infrastructure used to mine digital Gold is better used to process AI algorithms,â 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 bitcoinâs 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 Cantorâs thesis proves right, CoreWeaveâs 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.