Bernstein Lowers Price Targets for Several Bitcoin Mining Firms

On March 20th, as per The Block, analysts from the research and brokerage firm Bernstein have reduced their 2025 price targets for Bitcoin mining firms IREN, CleanSpark, and Riot Platforms. This is because the performance of these companies this year has lagged far behind that of Bitcoin. “Bitcoin mining company stocks have undergone a painful correction (down 20-40%), while Bitcoin has declined by 10%,” wrote analyst Gautam Chhugani in a client note on Thursday. “Overall, the performance of mining company stocks has been disappointing. There were no significant gains in the fourth quarter of last year, and the pullback since the beginning of the year has been even more severe compared to Bitcoin.” The analyst further added that institutional interest in mining companies is more concentrated on the high-performance computing narrative rather than the Bitcoin commodity cycle. Nevertheless, advocates of AI data center hosting diversification, such as IREN and Core Scientific, although they performed well in 2024, their performance this year has been worse compared to historically Bitcoin-focused mining companies like Riot and MARA.