Bitcoin Drops Below $63K as Asia Chip Crash Hits Wall Street
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- Bitcoin fell below $63,000 at Wall Street's open — its first sub-$63K print since July 17 — as a semiconductor-led sell-off originating in Asia spilled into US tech stocks.
- South Korea's KOSPI Index closed down 10.8% in a single session, driven by a 14.8% drop in chip-maker SK Hynix, while Japan's Kioxia Holdings fell 18.3%.
- Micron Technologies fell more than 10% at the US open, erasing a rebound to hit its lowest level since May 22, as the Nasdaq Composite slipped just over 1%.
- Crypto long liquidations topped $510 million over 24 hours, with analytics platform CoinAnk warning of a potential cascade below $64,700 and little resistance until the $65,800–$66,200 zone.
- Alphabet posted its first-ever quarterly cash burn of $5.9 billion in Q2 despite 82% cloud growth, as combined 2026 capex guidance from Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta tracks toward $725–730 billion — projected to climb near $900 billion in 2027.
- Moonshot AI's open-source Kimi K3 model, launched two weeks ago, has been benchmarked competitively against top proprietary systems from Anthropic and OpenAI, intensifying scrutiny over the return profile of Western hyperscaler spending.
Why it matters: The sell-off crystallizes investor doubts about AI infrastructure economics. Combined 2026 capex from Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta tracks toward $725-730 billion — with Alphabet already posting its first cash burn — and Chinese open-source models like Moonshot AI's Kimi K3 now matching top proprietary systems at a fraction of the cost. The market is testing whether that spend delivers proportional returns.
