Arthur Hayes Warns AI Data-Center Overbuilding Could End in a Crypto Rally

An AI infrastructure glut could make computing cheap while setting up a downturn and a cryptocurrency rally, Arthur Hayes argues. In a newly published CNBC interview, the former BitMEX CEO said the financial test could arrive in late 2027 or 2028, when new data centers come online and providers seek payment for customers’ computing commitments.

Hayes, co-founder and chief investment officer of crypto investment firm Maelstrom, answered CNBC’s questions at the Gamma Prime Investing Conference in Singapore. He called the data-center buildout a waste of “multi-trillion dollars,” arguing that the investment would ultimately leave computing power extremely cheap and plentiful.

His concern centers on the customers expected to pay for that capacity. Hayes named SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic as major computing users and said none was making money. As facilities under construction are completed, he expects infrastructure providers to collect on the computing power those customers have committed to buy.

Hayes’s expected sequence is overbuilding, a crash and then a bailout. He pointed to the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis and other episodes over the past two decades as reasons to position for the eventual response rather than simply bet against the construction boom.

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.

Arthur Hayes, answering CNBC’s questions at the Gamma Prime Investing Conference

In Hayes’s view, Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies could absorb the excess liquidity following a bailout. That is a forecast, not an announced rescue. He also said he dislikes shorting AI companies—betting on falling prices—and called that approach “not really a great investment opportunity.”

He offered a competing outcome: AI could become useful enough over the next 12 months for demand to grow and AI companies to turn profitable. That is the bull case he acknowledged alongside his expectation that the industry will build more infrastructure than it needs.

Hayes also distinguished AI’s customers from its suppliers. Nvidia and memory-chip makers are already making money, he said. For investors in those businesses, his question was whether share prices represent the right multiple of future earnings, rather than whether suppliers currently have profitable operations.

The same cheap-computing thesis underpins Flop, Hayes’s planned AI-agent payments project. CNBC reported an expected launch in the first quarter of 2027. Hayes said cheaper, more abundant computing would allow AI agents to proliferate, creating the opportunity his venture aims to serve.

Flop aims to create a spot market for computing power, rewarding participants with Flop tokens for providing GPUs and performing AI inference. Hayes’s proposed appeal is a currency that agents can convert directly into the computing power they consume. The marketplace and launch remain plans, not a completed release.