When an AI company abandons the founder's full-investment model and launches a 50 billion yuan financing round, the crypto market should not treat it merely as tech news. DeepSeek's pivot directly stems from the computational pressure brought by Anthropic's safety model Mythos — to counter an AI that can autonomously find vulnerabilities, it must expand its computing pool. And computing power is the hardest link connecting AI and crypto.

Over the past year, the crypto market has already felt the squeeze from AI's demand for computing power: tight supply of mining machine chips, rising data center electricity costs, and even increased storage chip prices have all been passed on to miners and on-chain infrastructure. DeepSeek's financing scale ($7.4 billion) is close to the total fundraising amount of top crypto venture capital funds, meaning that some capital that might have flowed into the crypto space is being siphoned off by the AI track.
More notably, DeepSeek was forced to migrate from CUDA to Huawei chips due to export controls, delaying the model by 15 months. This friction in the hardware supply chain also exists in the crypto mining machine market. When AI companies and crypto miners compete for the same advanced process capacity, cost transmission does not stop at the semiconductor sector.
The downside risk is that the AI financing boom may mask crypto's own liquidity issues. Bitcoin ETFs have seen continuous outflows, options are about to expire, and the capital spillover effect from the AI narrative is limited — institutional funds prefer to bet directly on AI targets rather than indirectly through crypto tokens. The computing power anxiety is real, but it will not necessarily push up crypto asset prices.
$btc #ai #defi #etf #on-chain data