Morgan Stanley Begins Coverage Of Bitcoin Miners As Wider Infrastructure Plays
The bank assigned overweight ratings to Cipher Mining and TeraWulf and a more cautious underweight rating to Marathon Digital.
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As bitcoin hovers around $70,000, down about 40% from its peak in October, Wall Street is prospecting mining companies for their potential beyond crypto. Morgan Stanley on Monday initiated coverage of bitcoin miners Cipher Mining, TeraWulf and Marathon Digital. The bank assigned overweight ratings to Cipher and TeraWulf and a more cautious underweight rating to Marathon.
Morgan Stanley isn’t hopping on the bitcoin bandwagon, though. Instead, it’s looking at miners as more of an infrastructure play than a crypto one, since the vast computing power they generate to mine bitcoin can be tapped for non-crypto uses, like AI.
The Power of Future-proofing
Bitcoin mining is becoming less profitable amid the crypto winter, and not all miners can handle the chill. The revenue miners make per terahash (a measure of how much power it takes to mine bitcoin) has fallen to about $35, down from $70 when bitcoin was trading at record highs.
As profitability plummets, miners have shut down operations, and mining difficulty — meaning how hard it is for miners to solve the cryptographic puzzles that add new blocks to the chain — has fallen. That can encourage miners to shut down, raising the likelihood of those who remain reaping the leftover rewards. It acts as a mechanism to lead the crypto back toward more stable ground.
Since the number of miners that can turn a sizable profit is limited, companies are looking beyond bitcoin to make the most of the power infrastructure they’ve built:
- Bitfarms plans to back out of bitcoin mining completely, announcing last week that it’ll move operations to the US and change its name to Keel Infrastructure, as it transitions towards powering AI.
- Hut8 is converting some of its bitcoin mining ops to AI power centers, in collaboration with Anthropic. Two of the miners Morgan Stanley initiated coverage of, Cipher and TeraWulf, have also shifted in part toward AI.
Win Win: Demand for power from data centers could grow by 74 gigawatts from last year to 2028, Morgan Stanley predicted. (For context, 5 gigawatts can power a major US city.) But accounting for how many data centers are planned, the US could be short about 49 gigawatts. Transitioning bitcoin miners away from crypto could alleviate that shortfall while leaving more profits for the miners that stay in the crypto game.
