The seven largest US technology stocks lost close to $800B on Thursday, dragged down by ballooning AI infrastructure spending. Bitcoin holds, slipping less than 1% on the day and still up around 3% on the week near $65,400. The gap has revived the idea of a decoupling between crypto and tech risk, even if nothing about it is confirmed yet.
Key Takeaways
- The Mag 7 erased close to $800B in market value on Thursday, their worst session since April 2025.
- Bitcoin held near $65,400, down less than 1% on the day and up 3% on the week.
- The trigger is AI capex fear, with Alphabet guiding spending as high as $205B, a risk hitting tech but sparing crypto for now.
The Mag 7 Erase $800B While Bitcoin Barely Moves
Thursday was brutal for US tech. The seven megacaps that carry the indices shed close to $800B in a single day, a 4.8% drop that leaves them 11% below their late-May peak. The group has now erased roughly $2 trillion from that top, a repricing that drains market liquidity of the kind also under scrutiny as the US Treasury threatens to pull $150B out of the system.
The broad indices followed without collapsing. The S&P 500 fell 1.2% and the Nasdaq 100 dropped 1.9%, a contained move given how hard the AI names were hit on their own. The pivot came from Alphabet and Tesla quarterly results, whose capital budgets caught the market wrong-footed.
The contrast with crypto is sharp. Bitcoin traded near $65,400, down less than 1% on the day and still up about 3% on the week. Where tech stocks were sliding, Bitcoin holds and barely moved, keeping its levels while the sector cratered.
The rest of the market corrected, but without panic. Ether lost 3% to $1,879, Dogecoin 5% to $0.069, XRP 2% to $1.11 and Solana 3% to $76. A broad but shallow pullback, far from the flushes that usually accompany a shock of this size on equities.
AI Capex Spooks Tech, Not Crypto Yet
The trigger is not slowing sales, it is exploding spending. Alphabet lifted its capital budget to as much as $205B for the year, and Tesla chief Elon Musk called 2026 a massive capex year while posting profits below expectations. The market is punishing capex that keeps climbing with no clear timeline for a return.
That kind of shock used to hit crypto head-on. Bitcoin traded on the same macro signals as the Nasdaq, rising and falling with risk appetite, much as in the episodes where the Fed’s firmness on rates dragged it back toward $58,000. Thursday’s session breaks that pattern, at least for now.
Institutional demand explains part of the resilience. Spot Bitcoin ETFs have pulled in close to $1B over seven straight sessions, a steady flow that cushions the swings, a reversal from the stretch when those same products bled $1B as BTC fell below $77,000. When money enters through that channel, it offsets the nerves of leveraged traders.
Still, this decoupling is anything but settled. The analysts cited in the reporting frame it as a hypothesis to watch, not a structural break. One session does not make a trend, and the correlation between Bitcoin and tech stocks has already vanished and returned before.
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A Decoupling That Has to Prove Itself for Weeks
In the short term, the holding structure works in Bitcoin’s favor. Supply available on platforms stays tight, in line with the move that saw exchange reserves fall to their lowest since 2017. Fewer coins ready to sell means a market less exposed to panic selling imported from equities.
The real test comes if the AI selloff deepens. A prolonged tech drawdown would probe the strength of the decoupling, because a liquidity shock usually ends up touching every risk asset. Bitcoin holds for a day, but it has not yet faced a full week of index carnage.
The macro backdrop makes the read harder still. US real rates remain elevated and offer a credible alternative to assets with no yield, which weighs on Bitcoin independently of tech. Thursday’s resilience should therefore read as an encouraging signal, not as proof of immunity.
For holders, the sequence is a case study. It shows Bitcoin holds through a tech shock instead of amplifying it, a behavior change that, if it holds over several weeks, would reshape Bitcoin’s place in a diversified book. The confirmation, though, will play out over time.
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