Why Bernstein Just Boosted Its Price Target for Bitcoin Miner IREN

Global investment firm Bernstein on Tuesday gave IREN an outperform rating and raised its price target for the company a day after Bitcoin miner and the data center company announced a $9.7 billion cloud services deal with Microsoft.

The Bernstein analyst said the deal was indicative of how crypto miners can cash in on the AI ​​industry, and raised his target price to $125 per share, noting that the company’s advantage lies in its access to captive power. IREN shares were trading at more than $69, up about 2% in Tuesday’s trading, according to Yahoo Finance. It rose 6% earlier in the day and has grown 1,000% in the past six months.

IREN, based in Sydney, Australia, will provide Microsoft with access to Nvidia’s NVIDIA GB300 GPUs as part of the five-year agreement.

“This deal reaffirms that Bitcoin miners are in an advantageous position, driven by their disproportionate ‘access to power’ in a power-limited world, giving them the opportunity to maximize performance on their power interconnection,” the note said.

The IREN-Microsoft deal is the latest between the Magnificent Seven tech titans and Bitcoin mining specialists.

Bitcoin miner Cipher Mining on Monday announced a roughly $5.5 billion, 15-year lease agreement with Amazon Web Services to provide key space and power for AI workloads.

Cipher in September signed a 10-year, roughly $3 billion high-performance computing colocation deal with Google-backed Fluidstack.

Google also in August said it was increasing its stake in Bitcoin miner Terawulf by providing an incremental backstop of $1.4 billion to support the project’s debt financing, bringing its total stake to $3.2 billion.

Bitcoin miners typically consist of industrial-sized operations of warehouses full of computers that process transactions on the crypto network.

Because they have accumulated so much computing power, some miners are pivoting their infrastructure to cope with the growing demand for AI.

But some experts have said Decrypt that industries are not as similar as they say, highlighting the higher energy requirements of AI operations.

Bitcoin was trading at around $101,320, down 5.8% in the past 24 hours, according to crypto markets data provider CoinGecko. BTC has fallen over 11% in the past week.

In a Myriad prediction market, more than 80% of respondents agree with the crypto entrepreneur KBM, who believes that Bitcoin will fall to $100,000, and not with the trader Mando who predicts that BTC will hit $120,000. Myriad is a unit of Dastan, the parent company of an independent editorial Decrypt.