Morgan Stanley Extends $500M Credit Line to Core Scientific, With Option to Reach $1B
Core Scientific has been telling the market it is no longer really a Bitcoin miner since at least mid-2024, when it signed its first major AI colocation deal with CoreWeave. Thursday’s announcement is the largest single piece of evidence yet that at least one major Wall Street bank believes it.
The Texas-based company said it closed a $500 million 364-day revolving loan facility with Morgan Stanley, with an accordion option allowing it to pull in an additional $500 million subject to standard conditions.
Borrowings carry interest at SOFR plus 2.50%, a competitive rate for a company that was in bankruptcy protection as recently as January 2023. CEO Adam Sullivan said the capital would allow Core Scientific to accelerate projects “approaching service readiness” and better meet what he described as growing customer demand.
The timing is quite noteworthy. Earlier this week, Core Scientific filed its annual report disclosing that it expects to monetize “substantially all” of its Bitcoin reserves in 2026. As of December 31, 2025, the company held 2,537 BTC with a fair value of $222 million.
It had already sold 1,900 of those coins in January for approximately $175 million, roughly $92,100 per coin, leaving around 630 BTC on the balance sheet.
Sullivan told investors on the Q4 earnings call that Bitcoin mining is now “essentially in runoff,” with remaining operations kept alive primarily to satisfy minimum power commitments at legacy sites while those facilities convert to AI-focused colocation. The loan facility is the capital infrastructure to fund that conversion at scale.
What the AI Pivot Actually Looks Like
Core Scientific’s shift toward high-density AI colocation has been underway since at least mid-2024, but the pace has accelerated sharply. The company’s largest contract is a 12-year, 200-megawatt agreement with CoreWeave, the GPU cloud provider backed by Nvidia, signed in June 2024 and later expanded to 500 megawatts.
That deal alone requires significant upfront capital expenditure before revenue begins flowing. Beyond CoreWeave, Core Scientific has been signing contracts with other AI and high-performance computing customers that require building out denser power and cooling infrastructure than traditional Bitcoin mining racks demand.
The $500 million facility, and the potential $1 billion total, is sized to fund that buildout without the dilution of another equity raise into a stock that has been under pressure.
For Morgan Stanley, the deal fits a broader pattern. The bank arranged over $27 billion in debt and equity financing for a Meta data center vehicle in October and separately completed a $5 billion financing for xAI this week.
The Core Scientific facility is smaller, but the borrower profile is notable: a company that emerged from Chapter 11 three years ago, whose asset base is converting from commodity computing to AI infrastructure, and whose stock has climbed roughly 300% over the past 18 months on that thesis.
The Broader Miner Pivot Is Accelerating
Core Scientific is not alone in this. MARA Holdings, which still holds 53,822 BTC and remains more committed to its Bitcoin treasury position, nonetheless updated its 2026 policy to permit sales of stockpiled coins to fund what it described as AI and high-performance computing infrastructure. Riot Platforms has been slower to pivot but has flagged HPC ambitions.
The pattern across public miners is becoming hard to ignore: Bitcoin mining margins compress after each halving, energy costs keep rising, and the capital intensity of AI data centers, while higher, comes with longer-term, higher-quality revenue contracts from hyperscaler customers rather than dependence on Bitcoin’s price.
Morgan Stanley’s willingness to write a nine-figure check to Core Scientific on a 364-day facility at SOFR plus 2.50% suggests that at least some of Wall Street has decided the AI infrastructure pivot, for companies with the right power assets, is a credit-worthy thesis rather than a speculative one.
