Why Bernstein Just Boosted Its Price Target for Bitcoin Miner IREN

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

Bernstein analysts said that the deal was indicative of how crypto miners can cash in on the AI industry, and boosted its price target to $125 per share, noting that the company’s edge lies in its captive power access. IREN shares were trading at over $69, up roughly 2% in Tuesday trading, according to Yahoo Finance. It was up 6% earlier in the day and has risen 1,000% over the past six months.

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

“This deal reaffirms that Bitcoin miners find themselves in an advantageous position, led by their disproportionate ‘power access’ in a power constrained world, providing them opportunities to maximize yield on their power interconnect,” the note said. 

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

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

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

Google also in August said it was upping its stake in Bitcoin miner Terawulf by providing an incremental $1.4 billion backstop to support project-related debt financing—bringing its total stake to $3.2 billion.

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

Because they’ve amassed so much computing power, some miners are pivoting their infrastructure to address growing AI demand.

But some experts have told Decrypt that the industries aren’t as similar as some claim, highlighting the higher energy needs of AI operations.  

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

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