Arthur Hayes bets AI data center crash will boost bitcoin

Arthur Hayes, co-founder and chief investment officer of crypto investment firm Maelstrom, is predicting that the artificial intelligence data center buildout will overshoot, crash, and ultimately send bitcoin higher.

Hayes, the former CEO of crypto exchange BitMEX, made the case in Singapore at the Gamma Prime Investing Conference, where he told CNBC that humanity is "wasting multi-trillion dollars" building AI data centers. In his view, the construction boom will result in an abundance of cheap computing capacity while burdening infrastructure providers with heavy financial obligations contingent on AI companies eventually paying for the capacity they have reserved.

SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic are among the end users driving demand for that computing power, Hayes said, and none of them currently makes money. Providers are expected to seek payment when new data center capacity is delivered, which Hayes places in late 2027 or 2028.

"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," Hayes told CNBC.

He argued that investors who get into position before such bailouts arrive stand to gain, citing the 2008 financial crisis and comparable historical episodes as examples. "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," Hayes said. "You just have to be patient."