Deniz 
While ranking Marathon Digital as “market perform,” Bernstein has ranked Riot Platforms, CleanSpark, IREN, and Core Scientific as “outperform” in a bitcoin mining report card today.
An analyst’s positive assessment indicating a stock will surpass its market or sector performance is known as an outperform rating. On the other hand, a market performance rating is a neutral evaluation expressing the predicted average performance.
Five main criteria form the foundation of the assessments: production and hash rate, operational and energy efficiency, power, hash costs, and the artificial intelligence strategy of every organization.
Bernstein claims that Marathon, Core Scientific, and CleanSpark are the three biggest bitcoin generators; the latter two particularly stand out with their realized hash rates. Riot is trailing in output and efficiency at the same time; last month, power credits helped to mitigate this.
Regarding operational and energy efficiency, Bernstein asserts CleanSpark and IREN “are in the sweet spots of energy efficiency and realized hash rate/uptime.” By switching to a self-mining approach, Marathon is also seen by the analysts as enhancing its uptime efficiency.
Regarding operating power capacity, Bernstein pointed out Riot and Core Scientific. IREN may, however, catch up going forward since it apparently “has two mega sites in the works” in Texas.
Thanks mostly to low power costs and good uptime, Core Scientific is also the “best in class” when it comes to hash cost. While Marathon keeps striving to lower its hash cost, Riot and CleanSpark lead Core Scientific in this measure.
Lastly, having committed large funds to data centers, Core Scientific is “a clear leader on AI strategy,” Bernstein notes. Thanks to its Texas mega sites being open for agreements with AI hyperscalers and the hire of Morgan Stanley to investigate AI deals for these sites, the analysts found IREN to be “a promising” narrative regarding AI/HPC.
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