Core Scientific heads into its Q1 earnings report on May 7 with the stock in the middle of a powerful short-covering rally — and with executives cashing out at every step of the way up.
The insider-selling pattern is hard to ignore. CEO Adam Sullivan sold nearly $1.7M worth of shares on April 15, having sold a further $4.7M on March 31 — the same day he received a 741,545-share award. Chief Legal Officer Todd DuChene sold stock on six separate occasions between April 1 and April 27. Net insider value sold over the past 90 days totals roughly $7.4M. The selling has accelerated as the stock climbed, with transactions executed at prices ranging from $15.25 to $20.94 — all well below where the stock closed Wednesday at $24.63.
Short interest, meanwhile, has been unwinding steadily. At 18.8% of the free float, the short position is still substantial — but it has come down from roughly 19.6% in late March and is off more than 5% from where it was a month ago. That steady covering has helped fuel the rally: CORZ is up 52% over the past month and 26% in the past week alone. The borrow market tells a permissive story for would-be new shorts — cost to borrow is near its lowest reading in two months at just 0.40%, and availability has eased considerably as utilization has dropped from roughly 50% in late March to around 27% now, meaning the lending pool is far from stressed. The ORTEX short score of 64 reflects the still-elevated but declining short presence.
The peer group confirms this is a sector-wide move. RIOT is up 48% on the week, HUT surged 53%, and KEEL gained 50% — so CORZ's rally is partly macro Bitcoin sentiment, not purely a company-specific re-rating. Options traders are not adding much conviction either way: the put/call ratio at 0.50 is essentially in line with its 20-day average of 0.52, with a z-score near zero, suggesting the options market is neither pressing for downside protection nor aggressively positioned for further upside.
The bull case centres on CORZ's pivot toward AI and HPC colocation — the CRWV hyperscaler contract and Texas site expansion represent meaningful revenue diversification away from pure Bitcoin mining volatility. Bears point to execution risk on that very pivot: delays in bringing power infrastructure online, financing uncertainty for future data centre buildouts, and a balance sheet carrying substantial debt. Analyst sentiment has tilted constructive, with Cantor Fitzgerald lifting its target to $29 in April and the consensus target now at $27.11 — slightly above current levels, though most of those upgrades and target hikes were set before the stock's most recent leg higher. The PE now sits at 206x and the EV/EBITDA at 22x, both moving materially higher with the share price.
Tonight's print will test whether the AI infrastructure story has progressed enough in the quarter — on revenue, contract milestones, and power capacity — to validate a stock that has more than doubled in two months while its own executives have been persistent sellers throughout the move.
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