Core Scientific has officially confirmed what the market had been watching unfold for months: the Texas-based company sold roughly 1,900 BTC in January for $175 million, averaging around $92,100 per coin.
Key Takeaways
Core Scientific is exiting its Bitcoin treasury strategy, selling 1,900 BTC in January and planning to monetize nearly all remaining holdings to fund AI infrastructure.
The company is pivoting toward its $10B+ long-term hosting deal with CoreWeave, with AI colocation revenue already surging 268% year-over-year.
Q4 results disappointed on revenue and earnings, and an accounting issue added noise – but liquidity remains strong at around $530 million.
What’s left in the treasury sits below 1,000 BTC – reports put the figure closer to 630 – and management has made clear that most of that will go too.
The company doesn’t plan to hold Bitcoin. It plans to sell it.
The Exit Strategy, Spelled Out
Core Scientific’s leadership stated in its Q4 2025 earnings disclosure that it expects to monetize “substantially all” of its remaining Bitcoin holdings through 2026. The cash will go toward capital expenditures for its AI infrastructure buildout – a strategy that’s been in motion since the company signed a landmark hosting contract with CoreWeave.
That contract, worth north of $10 billion over 12 years, covers 590 megawatts of hosting capacity. As of the week of the earnings call, approximately 350 MW had been energized – more than half the contract fulfilled – with close to 200 MW already in the billing cycle. Full delivery on the 590 MW is targeted for early 2027, and the contract is projected to generate an average annual revenue run rate of roughly $850 million once fully operational.
To expand beyond that, Core Scientific recently announced an agreement to acquire a 265-acre site in Hunt County, Texas. The site is designed to support an additional 430 MW of gross power capacity, with energization scheduled between 2027 and 2029. The company is targeting a total leasable pipeline of 1.5 gigawatts by 2028.
Q4 Numbers: Revenue Miss, AI Surge
The Q4 2025 earnings report itself was a mixed bag that didn’t sit especially well with markets.
Revenue came in at $79.8 million — well short of the analyst consensus near $122 million. The per-share loss landed at $0.42, far wider than the $0.08 loss analysts had expected. Shares fell between 4.5% and 5.4% in post-market trading on the back of the revenue miss and a separate disclosure about an accounting error.
That error — a historical misstatement related to property and equipment — will be flagged as a “material weakness” for the next four quarters, though management stressed it carries no impact on revenue or cash flow.
The headline net income figure of $216 million is misleading at first glance. The number is almost entirely attributable to a $330.3 million non-cash gain from fair value adjustments on liabilities. Strip that out and the operating picture looks considerably different.
Where the numbers did hold up: AI colocation revenue jumped 268% year-over-year to $31.3 million. That segment is the entire thesis here, and it’s moving in the right direction.
Core Scientific ended 2025 with approximately $530 million in total liquidity.
Analysts Stay Bullish, Despite the Noise
Despite missing on revenue and the accounting disclosure, analyst sentiment on the company’s direction has remained broadly constructive. Price targets currently range from $23 to $34, with a median around $25. The prevailing view is that the Q4 miss is largely a timing artifact — more CoreWeave capacity entering the billing cycle through 2026 is expected to shift the profitability picture materially.
The stock trades at a price-to-earnings multiple of roughly 121.74, a valuation that reflects infrastructure expectations rather than anything tied to Bitcoin prices or mining margins.
The Broader Trend
Core Scientific’s moves are aggressive, but they aren’t unusual in context. The post-halving environment has compressed mining margins across the industry, and several major operators have started redirecting capital toward data center infrastructure to stabilize revenue.
Riot Platforms sold roughly $200 million in Bitcoin in late 2025 to fund its own diversification push, including a 112 MW data center campus in Corsicana, Texas. MARA Holdings has partnered with Starwood to expand AI infrastructure while leaning on a comparatively low P/E of 2.92. Iris Energy — now rebranded as IREN to underscore the AI angle — landed a $9.7 billion deal with Microsoft for AI cloud services, with a 20% prepayment already secured. TeraWulf is operating AI factories powered by what the company describes as zero-carbon energy.
CoinShares has projected that for miners with active AI contracts, Bitcoin mining revenue will fall from roughly 85% of total revenue in early 2025 to under 20% by the end of 2026. That’s not a gradual shift — it’s a structural break.
What Comes Next
Core Scientific’s 2026 story hinges on execution. Construction timelines, grid interconnection approvals, and equipment delivery schedules are the variables that will determine whether the CoreWeave ramp plays out as planned or gets pushed. Analysts have flagged those risks explicitly.
But the direction of travel is not ambiguous. The Bitcoin is being sold. The data centers are being built. The question now is whether the infrastructure gets online fast enough to satisfy what the current valuation already assumes.
