Arthur Hayes: AI Is Overbuilt, and Bitcoin Could Benefit From It

Hayes leaves room for an AI bull case, arguing stronger demand within a year could make AI infrastructure companies more profitable overall. Arthur Hayes, the former BitMEX CEO and co-founder of crypto investment firm Maelstrom, told CNBC at the Gamma Prime Investing Conference in Singapore that humanity is “wasting multi-trillion dollars” on AI data centers. His bet is that the overbuilding ends in a crash and a bailout, and that Bitcoin and other crypto absorb the money that follows. Overbuilt, Then Bailed Out The buildout, he argued, will leave computing power “extremely cheap and extremely plentiful.” “If you study financial history and you study every single major technological rollout, it always is overbuilt. There always is a crash, and there always is a bailout,” he stated, pointing to the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis and other episodes since. “Thankfully, we have Bitcoin and other crypto to soak up that excess liquidity, and so we know the asset that’s going to perform the best when the bailout comes,” he added, telling investors “you just have to be patient.” He claimed SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic are among the end users behind demand for computing power, and t...