Core Scientific, Inc./tx (CORZ) — Fundamental Analysis

Core Scientific (CORZ) is a Bitcoin mining and digital infrastructure company that emerged from bankruptcy in early 2024 — and its financials tell the story of a business still very much in rebuild mode. Revenue has actually shrunk over the past three years, the company has burned through cash at the operating level in most periods, and the most recent quarter shows a net loss nearly seven times quarterly revenue on a margin basis. The one genuine bright spot is a dramatic improvement in gross margin — jumping to roughly 43% in the latest quarter, the best in years — suggesting the underlying mining and hosting economics are improving even as heavy capital spending and non-cash charges weigh on the bottom line. The company is in an aggressive reinvestment phase, pouring hundreds of millions into infrastructure, which is consistent with a long-term build-out strategy but leaves little room for error. Investors should treat this as a high-risk, high-capital-intensity story where the thesis depends on Bitcoin prices, energy costs, and whether that infrastructure buildout ultimately translates into durable profitability.

Snapshot & Big Picture

Core Scientific operates data centers focused on Bitcoin self-mining and high-performance compute (HPC) hosting. The company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in December 2022 — a direct casualty of the crypto bear market and collapsing Bitcoin prices that year — and emerged in January 2024. Since then, it has been rebuilding its balance sheet and pivoting toward HPC/AI hosting as an additional revenue stream. The financials below reflect a company still navigating that transition, with volatile margins, heavy capital requirements, and the structural unpredictability that comes with Bitcoin as a core revenue driver.

Latest Quarter Snapshot (Q2 2026 — Most Current Data)

The most recent quarterly filing covers the period ending June 30, 2026, and provides a more up-to-date picture than the annual figures. Key metrics from that quarter are shown below.

The headline here is the massive divergence between an improving gross margin (best quarterly reading in the dataset) and a deeply negative net margin. The -703.6% net margin signals that large below-the-line charges — likely depreciation, interest expense, and potentially impairments — are overwhelming operating results. The current ratio below 1.0 is a short-term liquidity caution flag. The negative debt-to-equity ratio reflects negative stockholders' equity, meaning total liabilities exceed total assets on book — a legacy of the bankruptcy restructuring and ongoing losses. Capital expenditures of $389 million in a single quarter against $164 million of revenue (a 2.37x ratio) underscores just how aggressively the company is investing in infrastructure.

Profitability — Multi-Year Trend

Profitability has been deeply inconsistent, swinging with Bitcoin prices and the company's own restructuring events.

The pattern is striking: 2021 was the peak of crypto euphoria, delivering CORZ's only clearly profitable annual period in this dataset. 2022's near-total collapse in gross margin (1.3%) and a catastrophic EBITDA loss of -$1.88 billion drove the bankruptcy. 2023 showed a modest recovery with positive EBITDA and near-breakeven operating margins. Then 2024 and 2025 deteriorated again — with 2025's gross margin falling to just 11.9% — suggesting the post-bankruptcy recovery has been rocky. The Q2 2026 gross margin of 42.7% is therefore an encouraging sign, but one quarter doesn't reverse a multi-year trend of bottom-line losses.

Financial Health & Capital Expenditures

Liquidity has been volatile. The current ratio swung from a dangerously low 0.20 in 2023 (mid-bankruptcy proceedings) to a very healthy 6.72 at end of 2024, likely reflecting cash raised post-emergence, then back down to 0.89 in the most recent quarter as capital spending has accelerated. The debt-to-equity ratio was not available in the annual filings (reported as null across all fiscal years), likely reflecting the complexities of reporting during and immediately after bankruptcy restructuring. The most recent quarter shows a negative debt-to-equity of -2.19, confirming that book equity remains negative.

Capital intensity is the defining financial characteristic of this business right now:

CapEx for 2020 and 2021 was reported as zero in the filings — it's possible spending occurred but wasn't captured in the line items available, so these should be treated with caution rather than as confirmed zero-spend years. What is clear is that 2025 and the current 2026 run rate represent an extraordinary step-up in reinvestment: spending more than $2 for every $1 of revenue generated. This level of capital intensity is consistent with a major data center expansion — likely tied to the HPC/AI hosting buildout — but it consumes cash at a pace that requires either strong operating cash flows (not yet present) or continued external financing. The sustainability of this spending trajectory is a central question for the investment thesis.

Revenue Growth

The apparent contradiction between the 3-year and 5-year CAGRs tells the real story here. The strong-looking 5-year CAGR of +39.5% is heavily influenced by the extremely low 2020 revenue base ($60.3M) before the company scaled rapidly into the 2021 crypto boom. The 3-year CAGR of -20.7% is more instructive for the recent trajectory: revenue has contracted meaningfully since the 2022 peak as Bitcoin economics shifted and the company navigated bankruptcy. Whether the HPC/AI pivot and the current infrastructure buildout can reverse that contraction into durable revenue growth is the core question facing the business. The 10-year window is unavailable because CORZ's SEC filing history does not extend back far enough to compute it.

Source Filings

• 10-Q filed July 28, 2026 — Quarter ended June 30, 2026
• 10-Q filed May 6, 2026 — Quarter ended March 31, 2026