Bitcoin ignored a bloodbath on Wall Street this week. The cryptocurrency traded steadily around $65,400 during Friday’s Asian trading hours. It completely decoupled from a severe tech stock selloff that just wiped out nearly a trillion dollars in corporate value.
The underlying crisis stems from escalating fears that the artificial intelligence boom is bleeding cash. Investors are aggressively punishing tech giants as massive AI infrastructure spending continues to outpace actual profits. The S&P 500 dropped 1.2% and the Nasdaq 100 fell 1.9% on Thursday.
The damage hit the biggest names the hardest. The “Magnificent Seven” megacap stocks shed roughly $797 billion in market value on Thursday alone. That marks the group’s worst single trading day since the tariff selloff in April 2025. This panic followed Alphabet pushing its 2026 capital expenditure forecast up to a staggering $205 billion, according to a Moomoo market report. Tesla CEO Elon Musk echoed that financial strain, bluntly labeling 2026 a “massive capex year.”
But the panic didn’t cross over into digital assets. Bitcoin held its ground. The broader crypto market did see some modest losses, though nothing mirroring the equity freefall. Ether slipped 3% to $1,879. Solana fell 3% down to $76. Dogecoin also declined 5% to settle at $0.069.
There is a hidden layer to this AI market shock. Moonshot AI recently launched its Kimi K3 model. Because it is a highly capable open-weight system, the release directly challenged the prevailing assumption that top-tier AI access will remain scarce. This shift threatens the core economics of Bitcoin miners who recently pivoted their operations to provide expensive AI data-center capacity, as detailed in an Investing.com crypto analysis.
Open-Weight Models Threaten the Miner Pivot Strategy
The rapid advancement of accessible AI models like Kimi K3 changes the math for the cryptocurrency mining sector. For the past year, major mining operations sought to offset fluctuating block rewards by renting out their high-end GPUs to AI developers. They banked on prolonged compute scarcity.
If open-weight models drastically reduce the compute premiums companies are willing to pay, miners who took on heavy debt to build out AI data centers will face a severe revenue gap. Bitcoin’s current price stability masks a brewing storm for the companies responsible for securing its underlying network.