AI Boom Will End in Trillion-Dollar Rescue, Says Arthur Hayes

Arthur Hayes, a partner at Maelstrom, believes the AI boom is a bubble that will eventually burst, resulting in a trillion-dollar rescue. He thinks the reckoning could arrive as early as 2027 or 2028, when AI companies face enormous commitments for data centers built on expectations of future demand.

Hayes' concern is that the companies expected to consume the computing power, such as Anthropic, OpenAI, and xAI, are economically shaky and do not make any money. The enormous sums being committed to infrastructure are not being matched by end demand, and Hayes expects the bill to come due soon.

He notes that the present phase is less a boom than expensive positioning, and that major AI companies and their surrounding infrastructure will become too big to fail. This would give Washington powerful incentives to prevent a disorderly collapse, leading to a trillion-dollar rescue.

For crypto, Hayes sees the prospective rescue as a liquidity event, with governments choosing money creation over allowing widespread losses to rip through heavily indebted economies.

Hayes is building a business designed for what he thinks the AI boom leaves behind, with his Flop Labs project developing FLOP, a blockchain network intended to connect AI agents with computing power. Miners contribute GPUs, process inference, and receive transaction fees plus FLOP block rewards.