In a bitcoin mining report card published today, Bernstein has rated Riot Platforms, CleanSpark, IREN and Core Scientific as “outperform” while rating Marathon Digital as “market perform.”
An outperform rating is a positive evaluation from an analyst suggesting a stock will exceed its market or sector performance. Conversely, a market perform rating is a neutral assessment indicating expected average performance.
The assessments are based on five key metrics: production and hash rate, operational and energy efficiency, power, hash costs, and each company’s artificial intelligence strategy.
According to Bernstein, the three largest bitcoin producers are Marathon, Core Scientific and CleanSpark, with the latter two standing out on realized hash rate. At the same time, Riot is lagging in production and efficiency, though it offset this with power credits and improved production efficiency last month.
In terms of operational and energy efficiency, Bernstein claims CleanSpark and IREN “are in the sweet spots of energy efficiency and realized hash rate/uptime.” The analysts also see Marathon improving its uptime efficiency by moving to a self-mining model.
Riot and Core Scientific are the leaders when it comes to operational power capacity, Bernstein noted. However, IREN may catch up in the future as it reportedly “has two mega sites in the works” in Texas.
Core Scientific is also the “best in class” when it comes to hashcost, thanks primarily to low power costs and strong uptime. Riot and CleanSpark are behind Core Scientific in this metric, while Marathon continues to work toward improving its hashcost.
Finally, Core Scientific is “a clear leader on AI strategy,” according to Bernstein, having allocated significant resources to data centers. The analysts identified IREN as remaining “a promising” story when it comes to AI/HPC, thanks to its Texas mega sites being available for deals with AI hyper scalers and its appointment of Morgan Stanley to explore AI deals for these sites.
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