Quick Reads:
- Bitcoin traded near $65,400 in Asian hours Friday, down less than 1% on the day but still up 3% for the week.
- The “Magnificent Seven” megacap stocks shed $797 billion in value on Thursday, their worst day since April 2025.
- Alphabet’s raised AI spending forecast and Elon Musk’s “massive capex year” comment for Tesla triggered the equity rout.
- Dogecoin led crypto losses, falling 5% to $0.069; ether, XRP, Solana and HYPE also slipped modestly.
- Analysts say bitcoin’s calm reaction could signal an early, unproven decoupling from the AI trade.
Bitcoin holds near $65,000 today, shrugging off a selloff that erased close to $800 billion from America’s biggest technology companies in a single trading session, a rare show of independence for an asset that has spent the past month moving in lockstep with the AI trade.
In Asian morning trading on Friday, bitcoin changed hands around $65,400, down less than 1% on the day and still up 3% for the week. It was a modest move compared to what unfolded on Wall Street a day earlier, when the so-called Magnificent Seven megacap stocks tumbled 4.8% and wiped out $797 billion in market value, their worst single-day loss since the tariff-driven selloff of April 2025.
That rout dragged the S&P 500 down 1.2% and the Nasdaq 100 down 1.9%, leaving the tech-heavy group 11% below its late-May record and erasing roughly $2 trillion in value from its peak.
The trigger was AI spending anxiety. Alphabet lifted its capital expenditure forecast for the year to as much as $205 billion, while Tesla CEO Elon Musk described 2026 as “a massive capex year” even as the company posted profits well below Wall Street’s expectations. Both disclosures landed after Wednesday’s close and confirmed a fear that had been building for weeks: that Big Tech is spending on AI infrastructure faster than it can prove the payoff.
That same fear has driven crypto’s price action for most of the month, with bitcoin often rising and falling in tandem with chip stocks rather than on its own fundamentals. So Thursday’s split, equities cratering while bitcoin holds near $65,000, stood out.
The rest of the crypto market wasn’t entirely spared. Ether slipped 3% to $1,879, XRP fell 2% to $1.11, and Solana dropped 3% to $76. Dogecoin was the session’s worst performer among majors, sliding 5% to $0.069 and down 4% for the week, while Hyperliquid’s HYPE token fell to $58, off 4% over seven sessions. Still, none of those declines came close to matching the scale of the tech-stock bloodbath.
Whether bitcoin’s calm marks the start of a genuine split from the AI trade remains uncertain. Many bitcoin miners have reinvented themselves as AI data-center operators in recent years, meaning a sustained pullback in AI spending could eventually filter through to crypto markets, just with a longer lag than it takes to show up in equities. For now, though, a day when the AI trade broke and bitcoin held near $65,000 anyway is being read as an early signal that the two markets may not be as tightly bound as recent weeks suggested.
