Bitcoin Holds Near $65,000 as $800 Billion Tech Selloff Leaves Crypto Largely Untouched

Bitcoin traded around $65,400 during Friday's Asian session, down less than 1% on the day, while roughly $800 billion was wiped off the market value of the biggest US technology companies, according to Bloomberg. For an asset that's tracked the AI trade almost step for step this month, sitting nearly still through that kind of equity carnage is unusual enough to be the story itself.

What Actually Happened

The selloff traces back to two earnings reports. Alphabet raised its 2026 capital expenditure forecast to as much as $205 billion, and Tesla's Elon Musk called this "a massive capex year" while reporting profits that missed expectations. Both landed after Wednesday's close, and together they confirmed a worry that had been building for weeks: that the biggest tech companies are pouring money into AI infrastructure faster than the returns can justify it.

The reaction was severe. The Magnificent Seven fell 4.8% on Thursday, their worst single day since the tariff-driven selloff of April 2025, dragging the S&P 500 down 1.2% and the Nasdaq 100 down 1.9%. The group now sits 11% below its late-May peak, around $2 trillion erased.

Why Crypto Barely Moved

This is the part worth paying attention to. Bitcoin has spent the past month trading almost like a proxy for AI-linked chip stocks, rising when semiconductor names rallied, falling when they wobbled. A selloff this size in the exact stocks bitcoin has been shadowing should, by that pattern, have hit crypto hard too. It didn't.

Ether slipped 3% to $1,879, and most other majors leaned red — dogecoin fell hardest at 5% on the day, XRP dropped 2% to $1.11, and Solana lost 3% to $76. Real losses, but modest ones set against what equities just went through.

Is This a Real Shift, or Just One Day?

Too early to say. There's a real reason the link between bitcoin and the AI trade might not fully break even if today's divergence holds: a meaningful share of bitcoin mining infrastructure has been repurposed into AI data-center capacity over the past couple of years. If AI spending genuinely slows, that connection to crypto likely still shows up eventually — it may just take longer to arrive than it did on the way up.

One session of independence is a data point, not a trend. Worth watching whether it holds through next week rather than reading too much into a single Friday.

Watching how bitcoin behaves relative to equities is part of the broader context TradeMesa analysts weigh before publishing a signal. See how signal confidence ratings work →

This article covers market conditions as of publication time and does not constitute financial advice. Crypto markets are highly volatile. Full Risk Disclaimer →