Hayes Warns AI Boom Bears Down on Bitcoin Price, Predicting Possible $50k Dip

Arthur Hayes, co-founder of Bitmex and chief investment officer at Maelstrom, recently published an essay titled 'Situationship,' in which he argues that the multitrillion-dollar artificial intelligence infrastructure boom is a leveraged real estate bubble. He believes this will end with a government bailout larger than 2008.

Hyperscalers, large cloud companies building data centers to train and run AI models, are financing real estate filled with rapidly depreciating hardware, says Hayes. This situation mirrors the 2008 financial crisis rather than the dot-com crash of 2000, he claims.

The Federal Reserve Board's May 2026 Financial Stability Report highlighted AI-related risks as a top near-term threat, with half of surveyed market contacts naming it a possible shock. Banks continue lending into this risk due to short-term interest rates below nominal economic growth while longer-term yields rise, making loans more profitable.

Hayes expects the announced pace of data center capital spending to decelerate from mid-2027, with the deceleration becoming apparent in 2028. He believes excessive lending will produce losses forcing policymakers to inject substantially more liquidity into the financial system.