The investment manager who helped thwart one of the biggest data center acquisitions of 2025 believes his bet on multibillion-dollar acquisitions is about to pay off in the new year.
Trip Miller, founder and managing partner of Memphis-based investment firm Gullane Capital Partners, believes data center developer and operator Core Scientific is on the verge of another big customer deal that will increase its value.
“Over the next 90 days, we're going to see more than 100 megawatts of deals announced,” Miller said. “It will show that there is more value out there than what we are being paid under our contract with CoreWeave.”
In October, Miller, Core Scientific's majority shareholder, opposed an offer by artificial intelligence cloud company Coreweave to acquire Core Scientific in a stock conversion deal, saying he felt the company was undervalued. The deal was originally valued at about $9 billion, announced in July, but has fallen to nearly half that amount as Coreweave's stock price has fallen in the months since. The company's shareholders rejected the deal in a vote on October 30, reflecting concerns about the deteriorating economic conditions it would cause.
Trip Miller, founder of Gullane Capital Partners. Gullane Capital Partners
Miller said expectations for a near-term commitment of about 100 megawatts were based on conversations with experts outside of the company's management. He predicted the company would find takers for a total of about 400 megawatts this year, citing strong demand for AI computing power.
Asked about potential future leases, a Core Scientific spokesperson said the company “does not comment on market rumors or speculation.”
If the effort comes to fruition, it would demonstrate the growing value of data center developers with a path to growth in an energy-constrained building boom.
Core Scientific said in an October investor presentation that it has about 1 gigawatt of data center capacity and an additional 1.5 gigawatts of power for expansion.
Evidence of an AI boom, not a bubble
A competing view will also be presented: that the hundreds of billions of dollars being spent on data centers, computer chips, and power infrastructure are supporting a permanent AI boom rather than a bubble.
“We are in a situation where there is likely to be a systemic shortage of computing, where the demand for computing will outstrip the supply,” said Stephen Bird, global head of thematic research and sustainability research at Morgan Stanley.
In a report published in December, Morgan Stanley suggested that one of the biggest hurdles for the AI industry is the enormous power load required to power the computing.
Morgan Stanley research suggests a significant and growing risk that data center developers may not have enough energy. morgan stanley
Morgan Stanley predicts that data centers, the vast facilities that handle the training of large-scale linguistic AI models and the inference computations that power them in everyday applications, will face a 47 gigawatt deficit in power from the national grid by 2028. This difference is nearly 10 times the average daily energy use in New York City.
Some of the main beneficiaries include cryptocurrency mining companies with power and utility contracts to quickly bring new facilities up and running.
From Bitcoin to AI wealth
Core Scientific and CoreWeave are both former crypto mining companies that have repurposed their businesses in recent years to focus on AI.
As power shortages worsen and headwinds to the cryptocurrency mining business arise, much of the industry is turning to data center computing.
Over the next three years, Bird said, Morgan Stanley expects about 12 gigawatts of mining facilities will be converted to AI and high-performance computing, about 60% of the mining industry's current gigawatts.
In September, Cipher Mining announced it would build a data center with 168 megawatts of computing power in Colorado City, Texas, and lease it to AI cloud company Fluidstack. Cipher's stock price, trading at about $5 a share in August, rose to about $25 in November after the announcement.
Another mining company, Iren, recently announced a $9.7 billion AI cloud computing deal with Microsoft. Hut8 announced last month that it had signed a deal to lease a 245-megawatt data center it is developing in Louisiana to FluidStack.
“Our view is that crypto miners in general are likely to largely pivot to providing high-performance computing infrastructure solutions and services,” said Paul Golding, an analyst covering the crypto mining industry at Macquarie.
In July 2025, CoreWeave announced that it had reached an agreement to acquire Core Scientific in a stock exchange. However, in the months following the announcement, CoreWeave's stock price fell and Core Scientific's stock price rose, effectively reducing CoreWeave's offer.
Since the deal fell through, Core Scientific's stock has been trading at a low of less than $14 per share, below the $17 per share the Coreweave deal would have cost.
Golding covers Core Scientific and has a $34 price target for the stock in October, more than double the current market price, which he attributes to the company's ability to extract strength in a constrained utility market. This estimate is “based on a portion of our evaluation of the potential value of uncontracted megawatts in our portfolio, our megawatt pipeline in the load study phase, and the sum of our existing colocation agreements with CoreWeave,” Golding said.
CoreWeave is Core Scientific's only data center customer outside of the traditional cryptocurrency mining facilities operated by Core Scientific. Core Scientific leases 590 megawatts to CoreWeave, representing about $10 billion in revenue over the next 12 years, a company spokesperson said. The company plans to repurpose 400 megawatts of its crypto mining business into high-performance computing over the next three years, a spokesperson said.
Miller said he expects future leases announced by Core Scientific will be for new customers.
“I expect they will announce AI deals with third parties other than CoreWeave,” Miller said.
