Did AI Kill the Crypto Bull Run? Where the Money Really Went

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
Welcome back to the Daily Crypto Deep Dive. Today we are asking one of the biggest questions in the market right now. Did AI kill the crypto bull run? Because for months, people have been saying the same thing. Money has rotated out of crypto and into artificial intelligence. But that can sound like a lazy excuse. It can sound like one of those phrases analysts throw around when Bitcoin is down, altcoins are bleeding, and nobody really knows what to say. So today, we are going to do it properly. We are not just going to say AI stocks are doing well. We are going to ask, which AI stocks? How much have they actually gone up? How much money, in market value terms, has been created? And then the big one? If even a chunk of that value had gone into crypto instead, where could Bitcoin and the wider market be today?
And straight away, the answer is pretty wild.
Before we get into it, a quick reminder. This show is supported by Kraken. If you are trading crypto and want to support the show, the Kraken link is in the description. We are also giving away 20 XRP to one listener who signs up through that link.
As always, this is not financial advice. Crypto is risky, stocks are risky, and you should always do your own research. But if you already trade crypto and want to support the show, we genuinely appreciate it. Now let's start with the claim. The claim is simple. Crypto has struggled because money has gone into AI instead. And looking at the market, that claim is not just made up. Coindesk has reported that crypto has been under pressure while investors have favored artificial intelligence-linked stocks. Bitcoin has been fighting around the $60,000 level. Ethereum has been weak. XRP, Dogecoin and Hyperliquid's hype have all taken bigger hits. And the market has been dealing with spot Bitcoin ETF outflows, a hawkish Federal Reserve and a stronger dollar.
But the key part is this. Risk appetite has not disappeared. People are not hiding under the bed with cash. They are still taking risk. They are just taking it somewhere else. And that somewhere else has been AI.
But when we say AI stocks, we need to be specific because this is not just one company. Most people immediately think of Nvidia, and obviously Nvidia is still the king of the AI trade. Nvidia makes the GPUs that power the AI boom. It sells the chips, the systems, the networking, and the full stack that companies need to train and run large AI models. But here is the interesting thing. Nvidia is not even the biggest percentage winner in the chip market this year.
Market Watch reported that Nvidia was actually one of the weaker performers inside the Semiconductor Index on a year-to-date basis, with the stock up around 14%.
But because Nvidia is so massive, that still matters. At a market cap of nearly $4.7 trillion, a 14% move is not small. That is roughly $577 billion of market value added. Just think about that for a second. One underperforming AI giant has added more than $0.5 trillion in value this year. That alone is bigger than the market cap of almost every crypto asset outside Bitcoin. It is bigger than Ethereum's market cap. It is bigger than XRP, Solana, Dogecoin and most of the altcoin market combined. Then you have Broadcom. Broadcom is not as flashy as Nvidia, but it is absolutely part of the AI machine. It is involved in networking, custom chips and infrastructure that helps data centers move massive amounts of information. Broadcom has been up around 15% this year. With a market cap around $1.7 trillion to $1.8 trillion, that works out at roughly $230 billion of market value added.
Again, that is one company. Then we get to where the AI trade has become really explosive. Memory chips. This is where Micron comes in. Micron makes memory, and AI needs insane amounts of memory. High bandwidth memory has become one of the most important bottlenecks in the whole AI supply chain. If you want huge AI data centers, you need chips, but you also need memory. You need the picks and shovels behind the picks and shovels. Reuters reported that Micron had gained more than 260% year to date, and other market data has shown even higher figures.
Using the more conservative number, Micron has added roughly $936 billion of market value. If you use the higher 300% plus figure, it is close to $1 trillion.
So now we are not talking about hype. We are talking about real, measurable value creation in public markets. Micron alone has added something like nearly half of the entire crypto market cap in value this year. Then you have AMD.