ARTHUR HAYES SAYS AI IS OVERBUILT AND A BAILOUT IS COMING — BITCOIN SOAKS UP THE PRINTING — MEANWHILE HE IS LAUNCHING AN AI COMPUTE TOKEN

Arthur Hayes, the former BitMEX CEO who now runs Maelstrom as co-founder and chief investment officer, told CNBC in Singapore that the world is “wasting multi-trillion dollars” on AI data centers. His sequence: “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 put the reckoning in late 2027 or 2028, when the data centers now being built are delivered and their owners want to be paid.

Who pays, in his telling: the buyers of the compute. He named SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic as the demand and said none of them makes money, CNBC reports. The bailout covers the rest, and he says the winner is already known: “Thankfully, we have bitcoin and other crypto to soak up that excess liquidity.” He told Bitcoin.com News the same thing at KBW 2026 days earlier: “Absolutely, it’s a bubble.”

Then the part that pays him. Hayes is launching Flop in the first quarter of 2027, a token that rewards people for supplying GPUs and running AI inference, a spot market for the cheap compute he expects the crash to leave behind. “That’s our bet.” He also called shorting AI “not really a great investment opportunity.” He is not betting against the buildout. He is betting on owning the leftovers.

The bailout is the bitcoin part, and it does not need his token. A rescue paid with new money is paid by everyone who holds dollars, in buying power. A coin with a fixed supply is the one thing in that story that cannot be diluted. At the time of this writing, bitcoin was $83,012.