Core Scientific Sells $208 Million in Bitcoin During Q1 as AI Pivot Accelerates
Core Scientific sold $208 million worth of Bitcoin during the first quarter of fiscal year 2026, the company said Thursday, as the bitcoin miner accelerated its transformation into an AI data center operator. The sales coincided with the company’s disclosure of a 590-megawatt contract expansion with cloud compute provider CoreWeave, projected to generate $10.2 billion in revenue over 12 years.
What the Q1 Numbers Show
Core Scientific (CORZ) published its Q1 2026 results via a Business Wire release on Thursday.
The company did not specify an average sale price for its Bitcoin disposals, but Bitcoin (BTC) traded between roughly $78,000 and $88,000 during the January-March period. Revenue details from the filing were not immediately available in the initial release summary, though the CoreWeave contract figures were confirmed.
The $10.2 billion projection spans 12 years, averaging roughly $850 million per year in contracted AI hosting revenue. CoreWeave, backed by NVIDIA, provides GPU cloud infrastructure for large-scale AI workloads.
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Background
Core Scientific emerged from Chapter 11 bankruptcy in January 2024 after a period of severe financial stress that followed the 2022 cryptocurrency market collapse.
The company listed on NASDAQ under the ticker CORZ after restructuring. Since its return to public markets, management has consistently signaled a shift away from pure-play bitcoin mining toward high-density AI compute hosting, where margins can be substantially higher.
The CoreWeave relationship became the centerpiece of that strategy. Selling Bitcoin from its treasury to fund infrastructure upgrades is consistent with that approach, as the company prioritizes long-term contracted AI revenue over spot cryptocurrency exposure.
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What Comes Next
The Oklahoma campus expansion, announced separately Thursday, targets 1.5 gigawatts of gross power at Core Scientific’s Muskogee facility, which would make it one of the largest single-site digital infrastructure campuses in the United States.
Management has not given a timeline for reaching full capacity. Investors will watch whether additional CoreWeave or hyperscaler contracts follow.
The Q1 Bitcoin sales reduce CORZ’s direct cryptocurrency exposure, meaning the stock’s correlation to BTC prices may continue to weaken as AI revenue grows as a share of the business.
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