Core Scientific, Inc. CORZ

The business

Core Scientific builds and runs big warehouses full of computers. For years those computers were its own, mining bitcoin. The plan now is to pull the miners out and rent the buildings, power, and cooling to companies running artificial intelligence, a business it calls high-density colocation, and that is now most of what it earns. The asset is what it always was: fenced land, a substation, and hundreds of megawatts of contracted electricity, the scarce thing everyone building AI wants and cannot get quickly. Core's edge is that it already owns the power and the shells and is converting them faster than a rival could permit and build from scratch. The catch is who rents them. Nearly all the new space sits under one hyperscale tenant on long contracts, and that tenant's warrants sit on Core's own balance sheet as a liability worth about $2.0 billion. The thesis needs two things true at once: AI demand for power stays hot, and that one tenant keeps writing checks.