Bitcoin holds near $65,000 as $800 billion AI selloff leaves crypto largely untouched

Bitcoin held near $65,000 in Asia morning hours on Friday, barely moving while nearly $800 billion evaporated from the biggest U.S. technology stocks – a rare stretch of independence for an asset that has tracked the AI trade all month.

The largest cryptocurrency traded at about $65,400, down less than 1% on the day and up 3% on the week. Ether slipped 3% to $1,879, and the rest of the majors leaned red. Dogecoin was the worst of them, down 5% on the day to $0.069 and 4% on the week. XRP fell 2% to $1.11, Solana lost 3% to $76, and Hyperliquid’s HYPE dropped to $58, down 4% over seven sessions. The moves were losses, but modest ones against what was happening in equities.

The Magnificent Seven, a colloquial term for the megacap group that has driven U.S. stocks for three years, fell 4.8% on Thursday and shed $797 billion in market value in their worst day since the tariff selloff of April 2025, according to Bloomberg.

The drop dragged the S&P 500 down 1.2% and the Nasdaq 100 down 1.9%, and it left the group 11% below its late-May record, erasing $2 trillion.

A key trigger was AI spending. Alphabet raised its capital expenditure forecast to as much as $205 billion this year, and Tesla chief executive Elon Musk called 2026 “a massive capex year” as the company reported profits well below expectations.

Both reports, delivered after Wednesday’s close, hardened a worry that had been building for weeks: that Big Tech is pouring hundreds of billions into AI infrastructure faster than the returns can justify.

That worry is the same one that has moved crypto all month, and it has usually moved it hard. Bitcoin rose when chip stocks rallied and fell when they wobbled, trading as a proxy for the AI capital cycle rather than on anything of its own.

Whether that is the start of a genuine decoupling or a single session remains an open question. Bitcoin’s miners have rebuilt themselves as AI data-center operators, so a sustained retreat from AI spending would eventually reach them, and the connection may simply be slower to transmit than it is on the way up.

But after a month in which crypto took its direction almost entirely from semiconductors, a day when the AI trade broke and bitcoin held is the first sign the two may not be joined as tightly as the rally suggested.