Core Scientific initiated with an Outperform at Macquarie on BTC, HPC catalysts

As previously reported last night, Macquarie initiated coverage of Core Scientific (CORZ) with an Outperform rating and $16 price target as the firm started coverage on five bitcoin mining datacenter companies. Underpinning the firm’s Outperform theses is an assumption that the fundamental drivers underpinning bitcoin price globally could continue, if not accelerate, making BTC production accretive. Additionally, the concentration of commodity resources – including power infrastructure, compute, and bandwidth – represent tangible value beyond forecast appreciation in bitcoin, adds the analyst, who calls out that only Core and Iris Energy (IREN) among its covered names are currently servicing third-party HPC hosting/cloud clients and that Core is “the only scaled player” via its hosting deal with CoreWeave.