Arthur Hayes says trillions are being 'wasted' on AI data centers

Former BitMEX CEO Arthur Hayes said humanity is "wasting multi-trillion dollars" on building AI data centers. He made the comments in response to questions from CNBC at the Gamma Prime Investing Conference in Singapore. Hayes is co-founder and chief investment officer of the crypto investment firm Maelstrom. He said the buildout would ultimately make computing power "extremely cheap and extremely plentiful."

Hayes said he expects the buildout to become overcapacity, setting up a downturn. "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 said. He pointed to the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis and other episodes over the past two decades.

Hayes said investors who position for those bailouts stand to benefit. "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," he said. He added that "you just have to be patient."

Hayes said SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic are among the end users driving demand for computing power, and that none of them makes money. He said infrastructure providers will seek payment for the computing power those companies have committed to once the data centers under construction are completed. That could come in late 2027 or 2028, when much of the new capacity is delivered, according to Hayes.

Hayes said the bull case — the optimistic scenario — is that AI becomes "so useful" over the next 12 months that demand grows enough for AI companies to become profitable. He said some companies supplying the AI boom already make money, pointing to memory chipmakers and Nvidia. The question for investors, he added, is whether they are paying the right multiple, meaning the price relative to expected future earnings. He said he does not like shorting AI companies — betting on falling prices — calling it "not really a great investment opportunity."

Hayes' new crypto venture, Flop, is an AI-agent payments project expected to launch in the first quarter of 2027. He said it aims to create a spot market — where computing power is bought for immediate delivery — rewarding participants with Flop tokens for providing GPUs, the graphics chips used for AI computing, and for performing AI inference, meaning running trained AI models. Hayes said there is currently no payments network for AI agents. "If agents can convert a currency directly into compute, which is what they eat and consume, then they will use this currency," he said.