B. Riley lifts CleanSpark price target to $26 on HPC valuation
B. Riley raised its CleanSpark (NASDAQ: CLSK) price target to $26 from $19 on Friday and maintained its Buy rating, based largely on the operator's potential AI/HPC value.
The target implies 81.3% upside to CleanSpark's $14.34 share price early Monday. B. Riley's sum-of-the-parts model produced a value of $25.76 per share, which the bank rounded to $26.
Analysts Nick Giles and Fedor Shabalin tied the HPC valuation to CleanSpark's 20-year infrastructure lease for 175 MW of critical IT load in Sandersville, Georgia. The tenant, which CleanSpark did not name, is a global technology company in the high-investment-grade tier, with initial delivery scheduled for the fourth quarter of 2027.
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B. Riley valued the Sandersville HPC asset at approximately $6.27 billion, applying a 20 times multiple to $314 million of modeled annual NOI. The bank separately deducted $1.93 billion of associated capex in its equity valuation.
That $6.27 billion asset value differs from CleanSpark's estimate of approximately $6.6 billion in contracted revenue over the initial lease term. The triple-net agreement includes annual escalators and two five-year extension options, which could increase total contract revenue to about $11.6 billion over 30 years if exercised.
B. Riley assigned additional potential HPC value of $3.89 billion to CleanSpark's Sealy campus and $7.02 billion to its Brazoria County campus. Those figures use 14 times modeled NOI, below the multiple applied to contracted capacity at Sandersville, and are accompanied by capex deductions of $2.59 billion for Sealy and $5.46 billion for Brazoria.
The Texas portfolio does not yet have a definitive lease. CleanSpark has a letter of intent and exclusivity arrangement with the Sandersville tenant spanning 718 acres and as much as 885 MW of secured and planned capacity, including nearly 300 MW at Sealy and as much as 600 MW at Brazoria.
B. Riley identified conversion of that exclusivity arrangement into signed leases as a key catalyst. Signed leases are also required to realize the Texas value embedded in the $26 target, since Sandersville is contracted while Sealy and Brazoria remain prospective.
The broader model included $1.53 billion of net debt and 257 million fully diluted shares. B. Riley also valued CleanSpark's bitcoin holdings at $905 million, using 13,924 bitcoin and a $65,000 price assumption, before arriving at total equity value of $6.61 billion.
B. Riley Securities' research disclosure says the firm received investment-banking compensation from CleanSpark during the preceding 12 months of the report.