Bitcoin Faces Liquidity Drain if Trump Targets AI Power Costs

Published by James Harris on June 9, 2026June 9, 2026

Arthur Hayes has laid out a specific sequence in which rising oil prices force Donald Trump into anti-AI rhetoric, that rhetoric spooks equity markets, and the resulting liquidity drain hits Bitcoin alongside everything else. The argument, published on his Substack, is less a crypto thesis than a macro one with Bitcoin caught in the crossfire.

The core logic runs like this: oil above a certain threshold becomes a political problem for swing-state voters before November, Trump needs a villain, and data centers consuming power and capital are a more photogenic target than interest rates. Hayes said the Tesla precedent is instructive here: the stock fell 18% intraday when Trump threatened contracts tied to Elon Musk’s businesses, and South Korea’s Kospi nearly hit limit down on AI-tax speculation before officials walked it back. Both moves reversed, but the signal was clear enough. Markets are now pricing in the possibility that AI-sector intervention is a tool a second-term president would actually reach for.

The more uncomfortable number in Hayes’s piece is not the oil price but the debt figure: roughly $1.3 trillion in AI-sector issuance since 2025 alone, against a U.S. M2 expansion of comparable size over the full period since late 2022.

If that framing holds, the Bitcoin story from 2022 to 2025 was partly a liquidity story that AI and Bitcoin were competing for the same pool of dollar-denominated risk appetite, and Nvidia winning 11x while Bitcoin gained roughly 8x over the same stretch is consistent with that competition. The pending IPO pipeline makes this more acute, not less: SpaceX at a rumored 100x sales multiple, followed by Anthropic and OpenAI, would represent an equity supply event with no real precedent outside the full dot-com wave, and that supply has to come from somewhere. Hayes’s fund has already moved: long U.S. energy producers, out of AI equities, and has sold positions in HYPE, NEAR, WLD, and ZEC, while retaining Bitcoin and Ether with tactical short hedges in place.

The Fed meeting on June 16-17 is the nearest concrete inflection point. Hayes expects Kevin Warsh to hold rates but deliver a hawkish tone, which historically has been enough to pressure risk assets even without an actual hike. Whether oil cooperates with that timeline or the Hormuz situation de-escalates first will determine whether any of the three threats he identifies, energy costs, IPO supply, and political rhetoric, arrive together or sequentially.