Bitcoin miners were some of the hardest hit in the DeepSeek scare earlier this week, and one of Bernstein’s favorite names is now available at a “deep discount.” Core Scientific , a leader among bitcoin miners chasing artificial intelligence deals, lost about 30% in the sell-off. It is now 42% off Bernstein’s $17 price target on the stock. “Our top pick, CORZ offers ready ‘power access’ and data center buildout to HPC cloud partners such as CoreWeave, who in turn are contracted by hyperscalers and AI labs,” analyst Gautam Chhugani said in a note Thursday. “Bitcoin miners are the second derivative of the AI capex story.” “We are inclined to believe bitcoin miners have a 12-18 month finite window to build a hybrid data center business, while the hyperscaler capex remains persistent,” he added. “CORZ is the leader of the pack.” CORZ 5D mountain Core Scientific is trading at a “deep discount” after the DeepSeek scare, according to Bernstein. Core Scientific came out of bankruptcy about a year ago and inked its $6.7 billion partnership with Nvidia-backed AI startup CoreWeave in August. That gave it a first-mover advantage over other “hybrid” bitcoin miners, according to Chhugani. Most publicly traded bitcoin miners have chased the same trend, making them so-called hybrid miners, or those that operate both a bitcoin mining business and an AI business. Chhugani said that after the correction, at an enterprise value of $2.7 million per megawatt, Core is trading closer to pure-play bitcoin mining valuations than data center valuations, despite 70% of its capacity being allocated to AI. Pure-play bitcoin miners such as Mara Holdings and CleanSpark average about $1.5 million per megawatt, while data center companies such as Equinix and Iron Mountain average $34 million per megawatt. Analysts from Piper Sandler and Cantor Fitzgerald said in notes earlier this week that the DeepSeek-driven sell-off is overdone and creating good buying opportunities in bitcoin miners. H.C. Wainwright has a contrarian view on miners’ near-term monetization opportunities for AI, however. Analyst Mike Colonnese told CNBC that hybrid miners such as Core will underperform pure-play miners this year.
