Bernstein says bitcoin miners' AI infrastructure deals look cheap vs. data-center REITs but not all are equal.

Bernstein reportedly said on Wednesday that Core Scientific's eye-catching 75% return on assets from its CoreWeave deal wasn't a template other Bitcoin miners could replicate. In a report by TheBlock, the firm used a valuation method typically applied to data center landlords to gauge how Bitcoin miners' AI infrastructure investments stack up against one another. The analysis compared returns at Digital Realty and Equinix with those of five miners currently leasing capacity to AI tenants: TeraWulf, Riot Platforms, Cipher, CleanSpark, and Core Scientific.

Core Scientific's deal with CoreWeave showed a 75% five-year average return on assets and a 79% yield on cost—numbers driven by an unusually capital-expenditure-light structure rather than superior contract terms. The cost to build out the 590 megawatts that Core Scientific is providing to CoreWeave totals $855 million. CoreWeave financed $750 million of that through revenue prepayments, leaving Core Scientific to fund just $105 million from its own balance sheet, or about $1.5 million per megawatt of computing capacity—a fraction of what peers typically spend. According to Bernstein, Core Scientific's edge wasn't a better contract; the deal cost the company nearly nothing upfront.

Riot Platforms emerged as the other exception, posting a 23% five-year average return on assets and a 29% yield on cost, driven by an incremental $3.5 million per megawatt to retrofit existing Bitcoin facilities—putting it on par with Equinix. "We believe such capex-advantaged deals are limited and do not reflect the overall economics of emerging AI infra players," Bernstein's analysts said.

The stabilized returns of 5% and 4% on assets at TeraWulf and Cipher offered a more realistic picture of what miners-turned-AI-landlords should typically expect, rather than Core Scientific's outlier numbers. TeraWulf spends about $8–10 million per megawatt of computing capacity, compared to Cipher's $9–11 million, a gap largely driven by the power infrastructure already in place at each company's sites. CleanSpark is trading nearly in line with Cipher.

CleanSpark's $6.6 billion, 20-year lease of a facility in Sandersville, Georgia—its first AI colocation deal—generates roughly $1.9 million per IT megawatt in annual revenue, trailing the $2.4 million TeraWulf pulls from its 20-year Anthropic contract under a similar lease structure.

Bernstein rated the sector "Outperform" across the board, assigning price targets of $36 to TeraWulf, $32 each to Cipher and Core Scientific, $30 to Riot, and $24 to CleanSpark, with MARA Holdings the lone "Market-Perform" at $17. The firm noted that the 7 gigawatts of power miners have contracted so far represents under a quarter of their combined 30-gigawatt pipeline still to come.

Bernstein's framework echoed an argument VanEck's Matthew Sigel had made late the previous month, pointing to Blackstone's $3.5 billion acquisition of a Digital Realty data center portfolio, priced at roughly $27 million per megawatt, to argue that Cipher and Hut 8 trade well below what stabilized AI infrastructure is fetching in the private market.