4 months ago
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Mining stocks have been seeing some appreciable gains in recent months.
Popular broker Canaccord has tipped Iris Energy (IREN) to become one of the most efficient and biggest publicly listed Bitcoin (BTC) miners in the game. The prediction comes up following research by Canaccord’s team of analysts who have expressed high hopes for Iris Energy’s options in high-performance computing (HPC). That is, as it prepares to float its pilot in Childress, Texas, in the second half of 2024.
According to Canaccord, only very few others in the mining business could boast the level of power that Iris Energy currently has at its disposal. An excerpt from the research report reads:
“The company is building 510 megawatts (MW) of data centres in 2024, secured 2,160 MW of power capacity, and has a 1 gigawatt (GW) plus development pipeline.”
In view of Iris’ mining capacity, the broker has now raised its share-price target for the company. That is from an initial $12 to $15. Interestingly, though, Canaccord has chosen to maintain its buy rating.
Furthermore, Canaccord shared that it expects the Sydney-based company to make waves even beyond its mining operation. The team wrote about Iris Energy:
“We think management will be opportunistic in expanding the use case for its data centres beyond bitcoin mining and is well-prepared from a power, cooling, and network perspective.”
Iris Energy Flourishes as Mining Stocks Boom
Meanwhile, it might be worth noting that mining stocks have been seeing some appreciable gains in recent months. Many of the stocks have been on a ride since Core Scientific’s (CORZ) artificial intelligence (AI) announced a deal with cloud computing firm CoreWeave in June.
As Wall Street giant JPMorgan (JPM) said last week, it appears that the market is interpreting the deal as AI and HPC opportunities could offer alternative use cases for Bitcoin mining sites.
Luckily, Iris Energy has not been left out of this trend as it was seen trading 1.6% higher at $11.06 per share in early Wednesday trading on Nasdaq. While this is a notable gain, Iris Energy shares remain a long way from its fall earlier this month when it plummeted 14%. That was at the time that a short seller shared negative thoughts on the Childress site as being unsuitable for hosting artificial intelligence or high-performance computing. Before that period, the shares were valued at around $14.
Notably, Iris is primarily an infrastructure company. So Canaccord has suggested ways that it believes Iris can monetize the infrastructure it is building. These include Bitcoin mining, AI cloud, and AI colocation, the report noted.
