How a January 15 Call Could Hand Core Scientific to the Sharks

In trading desks from New York to London the real January drama is not the next CPI print. It is a single decision date sitting on MSCI’s calendar. On January 15 the index giant is expected to finalize a proposal that could push bitcoin exposed names including big miners and bitcoin treasury style companies out of its benchmarks. That sounds technical until you remember how the modern market works. Indexes are the rails and roughly trillions of dollars of passive and rules based capital ride on them. If certain miners like Marathon Riot and CleanSpark end up on the wrong side of that ruling the result is not a polite rotation. It is forced selling that could reach into the 10 figure range and turn already volatile tickers into liquidity stress tests. Commentary in the market has floated scenarios where similar exclusions tied to bitcoin heavy balance sheets lead to multi billion dollar outflows across MSCI linked products.​

To understand why sophisticated players are circling names like Core Scientific you have to zoom in on the unit that really matters megawatts. Core Scientific controls hundreds of megawatts of data center power originally built for bitcoin mining and is pivoting that footprint into high performance computing for AI through multi year hosting deals with CoreWeave. One detailed breakdown of those assets pegs Core Scientific’s implied value around $5.6M per megawatt based on public market cap and uncontracted capacity. By contrast a marquee deal to acquire Aligned Data Centers which serve AI cloud and enterprise customers valued that infrastructure at roughly $8M per megawatt. Same substations same transformers same 24/7 power draw different sticker price because one is wrapped in an AI narrative and the other has “bitcoin miner” in the ticker description.​

That spread is exactly what is attracting sharp money. CoreWeave already has more than $10B of revenue commitments tied to hundreds of megawatts at Core Scientific sites and then moved to acquire the company outright to lock in 1.3 GW of gross power capacity across its footprint. Even after a contentious shareholder process around earlier deal terms analysts kept coming back to the same takeaway. There is a structural valuation gap between AI labeled infrastructure that clears at something like $8M per megawatt and public mining peers that the market is still pricing materially lower despite increasingly AI heavy contracts. If you believe compute is the new oil that gap is not a curiosity. It is an arbitrage.​

Enter Citadel. On December 10 a Schedule 13G filing showed Citadel Securities entities crossing the 5.5% ownership threshold in Core Scientific with roughly 17.2M shares. The stake is formally passive and largely tied to market making inventories but the signal is clear to anyone who has watched this movie in other sectors. When liquidity firms lean into a name ahead of structural catalysts they position themselves at the center of the order flow when volatility hits. If MSCI’s eventual framework pushes more bitcoin correlated names out of its indices and passive capital is forced to sell miners and treasury style plays that becomes a supply event into a book already controlled by fast desks.​

This is where “the exclusion creates the entry” stops sounding like a slogan and starts reading like a trade plan. If MSCI’s rules tighten around companies whose bitcoin exposure crosses key thresholds passive funds will have to dump first and ask questions later. That selling does not care whether Core Scientific is now functionally an AI infrastructure operator with a multiyear CoreWeave backlog or whether Marathon and Riot are quietly signing high performance computing colocation deals alongside mining. It only cares about index eligibility screens. On the other side of that forced flow sit hedge funds prop desks and market makers that have already run the per megawatt math and compared it to AI data center comps.​

The insider read right now is that January 15 is less about crypto being “kicked out” and more about a transfer of ownership. Index capital that bought these names for exposure to bitcoin beta and later for balance sheet arbitrage may be pushed out by rule changes. Strategic and trading oriented players who think in megawatts basis points and optionality get the chance to step in at distressed valuations relative to AI infrastructure. Citadel’s disclosed stake in Core Scientific sits as a real time example of that posture. If MSCI pulls the trigger the first move will look like a liquidation. To the desks watching the spread between $3M and $8M per megawatt it will look like inventory.

Originally published at https://coinbasecorridor.blogspot.com on December 17, 2025.

How a January 15 Call Could Hand Core Scientific to the Sharks was originally published in Coinmonks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.