Riot Platforms (Riot) featured consecutive upgrades from Wall Street on Friday. JPMorgan and Citigroup have raised the outlook for Bitcoin miners amid changing industry economy and a shift towards high-performance computing.
JPMorgan pushed Riot from neutral to overweight, raising its price target from $15 to $19, calling it the most attractive of its mining buddies. City upgraded to buy from Neutral, increasing its price target from $13.75 to $24. The companies pointed to the pivot of riots towards artificial intelligence and cloud services as potential growth drivers as mining profits get tougher. Riot conservatively surpassed the sharply low sector on Friday, down from “just” 1.2% to $16.55.
In addition to the Riot upgrade, JPMorgan downgraded the previously extremely hot handed Iren by losing weight from neutral. Stocks are down 9.7% on Friday, but are up 300% per year. CleanSpark (CLSK) was cut to neutral, 9.3% lower on Friday and 34% higher since the start of the year.
The bank maintained its purchase rating for Crypto Mining (CIFR) and doubled its price target from $6 to $12. The shares were 3.5% lower at the time of issuance, at $11.20.
Mara Holdings (Mara) was kept overweight, with a price target of $22 to $20 reduced. Stocks were 1% lower at around $15.90 in early trading.
JPMorgan analysts use Core Scientific (CORZ) 800 MW CoreWeave (CRWV) transactions as benchmarks, where Riot, Cipher and Iren each assign a 50% chance of secure, short-term, high-performance computing (HPC) colocation contracts. The bank values HPC colocation agreements at $8.6 million per Megawatt (MW) ranging from $3.7 million to $8.6 million.
read more: Bitcoin mining profitability fell in August, Jeffries said
