Analysts are closely evaluating the renewed interest from CoreWeave (CRWV) in acquiring Core Scientific (CORZ). Although neither party has revealed a potential deal price, analysts are already offering their own projections. Cantor Fitzgerald analyst Brett Knoblauch believes that the Core Scientific deal could be priced at over $30 per share. At the same time, Roth MKM analyst Darren Aftahi noted that CoreWeave could pay up to $38 per share in an all-stock deal for CORZ. Shares of both companies are trending higher in pre-market trading at the time of writing.
CoreWeave is a cloud-computing and artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure company. CRWV also leases access to Nvidia’s (NVDA) graphic processing units (GPUs) to big tech clients. On the other hand, Core Scientific provides Bitcoin mining and hosting facilities in North America. The two companies do share a long-term partnership, in which Core Scientific supplies large amounts of data center space and power to support CoreWeave’s high-performance computing (HPC) needs and AI workloads.
Analyst Aftahi says that CoreWeave acquiring Core Scientific “makes a lot of sense” because it would prove highly beneficial to the company. Primarily, it would add more capacity to CoreWeave and eliminate the hefty annual lease payment of $850 million from its expenses. It would also mean that CoreWeave would own its data centers outright.
Notably, Aftahi’s “rudimentary accretion/dilution analysis” suggests that CoreWeave could end up paying up to $38 per share for the deal. Aftahi kept his Buy rating and $20 price target on CORZ stock, which implies 22.3% upside potential from current levels.
According to Knoblauch, CoreWeave is set to pay roughly $15 billion to $16 billion to Core Scientific over their 12-year partnership. These payments will go toward capex and lease expenses for utilizing Core Scientific’s data centers and power. The analyst noted that even after making these massive payments, CoreWeave will not retain ownership of the data center infrastructure.
Thus, Knoblauch believes that the acquisition makes sense and that CoreWeave would not mind paying a significant premium for buying Core Scientific and still “save billions of dollars.” Knoblauch has a Buy rating on CORZ stock and $18 price target, which implies 10% upside potential from current levels.
On TipRanks, all 12 analysts who currently rank CORZ stock have given it a Strong Buy consensus rating. Also, the average Core Scientific price target of $17.83 implies nearly 9% upside potential from current levels.
