Bitcoin holds near $65,000 as $800 billion AI selloff leaves crypto largely untouched
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- Bitcoin traded at about $65,400 in Friday's Asian session, down less than 1% on the day and up 3% on the week, while nearly $800 billion evaporated from U.S. megacap tech stocks in a single Thursday session.
- The Magnificent Seven fell 4.8% on Thursday, shedding $797 billion in market value — their worst day since the April 2025 tariff selloff — and leaving the group 11% below its late-May peak after erasing roughly $2 trillion.
- Alphabet raised its capital expenditure forecast to as much as $205 billion for the year, and Tesla CEO Elon Musk called 2026 "a massive capex year" as Tesla reported profits well below expectations, hardening fears that Big Tech is spending on AI faster than returns can justify.
- The S&P 500 fell 1.2% and the Nasdaq 100 dropped 1.9% on Thursday, while Ether slipped 3% to $1,879, Dogecoin led the majors lower with a 5% drop to $0.069, XRP fell 2% to $1.11, and Solana lost 3% to $76.
- Bitcoin had tracked the AI trade all month — rising with chip stocks and falling with them — but its resilience during Thursday's equity rout marked the first hint of a possible decoupling between crypto and the AI capital cycle.
- Bitcoin miners have rebuilt themselves as AI data-center operators, meaning a sustained retreat from AI spending would eventually transmit to the crypto sector, even if slower than on the way up.
Why it matters: The $797 billion Mag 7 wipeout on AI-spending fears was the worst tech rout since April, yet Bitcoin held within 1% — a session that may signal the first break in a month-long pattern where crypto traded as a proxy for the AI capital cycle. If the decoupling sticks, it reframes Bitcoin's risk profile away from semis exposure; if it doesn't, miners' growing identity as AI infrastructure operators means the pain simply transmits on a lag.
