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Nvidia, AMD Slide As AI Trade Sways, Kraken’s AI Buy Signals Crypto Data Convergence

A two day wobble in megacap tech has reminded investors that the AI trade isn’t a one way escalator, even as builders keep shipping, and crypto doubles down on AI data bets. Today, chips retrenched, research labs pushed frontier ideas toward commercialization, and token markets leaned into AI narratives with fresh capital and M&A.

The AI rally finally met gravity. Reuters cited a “vulnerability in AI trade” as the Nasdaq fell for a second straight session, with chip names leading declines. The Wall Street Journal’s mid day wrap was blunter, “AI trade down.” That tracks the broader tape as investors reassess the next leg of growth for Nvidia, AMD, Microsoft, Meta, and Palantir after an 18 month run that pulled returns forward. A fresh bout of “AI bubble” chatter hit the tape across mainstream outlets, and an industry blog captured the mood, the chip stock sell off “accelerates” as hype faces a reality check.

What changed? Not the thesis, demand for compute remains unrelenting, but the timeframe. Capital markets are increasingly distinguishing between near term hyperscaler capex absorption and the slower ramp of model driven software revenues. In that context, the sell off looks less like an indictment and more like a duration reset. Nvidia’s ecosystem exemplifies both sides, while suppliers and “AI adjacent” names have ridden its coattails, one cheerleading note even highlighted an “AI stock you’ve never heard of” surging on proximity, the market is harsher on anything without line of sight monetization.

Rotation risk is back, too. When “AI jitters rattle tech investors,” per Reuters’ second day note, liquidity flows to cash and defensives, not next best AI proxies. For founders and operators, the signal is to trade hype for KPIs, inference unit economics, deployment velocity, and payback periods. For public investors, this reset is constructive; it forces a reprice of supply chains and clears room for earnings to catch up. The names to watch into month end are exactly the ones under the microscope, Nvidia and AMD on utilization, Microsoft and Meta on AI attach, Palantir on net expansion. Survive the scrutiny, and the multiple expands again.

💸 Funding Watch

While screens flashed red, the pipeline from lab to market looked busy. MIT researchers outlined a “periodic table of machine learning” to systematize model selection; that kind of framework tends to migrate quickly into developer tools and AIOps startups. In biotech, MIT profiled work “using generative AI” to design compounds that can kill drug resistant bacteria, fuel for a wave of AI native drug discovery companies pitching faster hit to lead cycles and lower wet lab burn.

Two infrastructure threads stand out. First, reliability, one team “teaches AI models what they don’t know,” and another proposes “an efficient way to train more reliable AI agents.” In an enterprise buyer’s market, provable uncertainty handling and reproducibility aren’t academic niceties, they’re procurement unlocks. Second, database intelligence, “MIT researchers introduce generative AI for databases” hints at the next crop of query copilots and autonomous tuning layers embedding into Snowflake, Databricks, and Postgres ecosystems. Expect seed rounds here to get done even as growth investors press pause elsewhere.

Founder tools are quietly compounding. An “AI JetPack” that accelerates the entrepreneurial process reads like a meta productivity layer for company building. Combine that with a drumbeat of developer friction, Stack Overflow threads flagging Azure AI “service request failed error 400” and GitHub Copilot responses blocked because they “matched public code”, and you get the obvious wedge, reliability tooling for generative AI in production. Investors love painkillers; today’s error logs are tomorrow’s ARR.

No big ticket venture prints crossed our desk today, but that’s typical in choppy weeks. The pattern is clear, capital is discriminating, not disappearing. The research coming out of top labs is heavily application oriented, and the next funding cycle will reward teams that turn these papers into control knobs for cost, latency, and safety. If public markets are punishing vibes, private markets are about to price verifiability.

🪙 Crypto Moves

As equities flinched, crypto pressed its AI advantage. Kraken “acquires Capitalise.ai,” a deal that underlines how exchanges are racing to bundle natural language automation and analytics for retail and pros alike. Expect everyone else, from Coinbase to Bybit, to respond; the moat won’t be listing breadth, it will be data driven UX that compresses strategy scripting from hours to prompts.

Fresh capital is flowing to AI data plays. Cointel “raises $7.4M in [a] strategic round led by Avalanche,” a clean, verifiable stat that shows L1s are willing to bankroll analytics that deepen their own ecosystems. Meanwhile, the presale economy is back in force. Multiple trackers touted Ozak AI, with one noting it “surpasses $2M raise” and another hyping a jump “from $0.005 presale to $2 launch target.” Caveat emptor, those price targets come from promotional materials, not exchanges. But ignore the mania at your peril, narratives attract liquidity, and liquidity begets listings.

There’s an IPO drumbeat, too. One roundup flagged an “IPO wave” as AI and crypto companies accelerate listing plans. If even a slice of that pipeline materializes, public crypto equity hybrids will give traditional investors a cleaner way to express the AI data thesis without touching tokens. And that’s the through line with the public market jitters, while chip multiples recalibrate, crypto is operationalizing AI narratives via M&A, token treasuries, and go to market experiments at internet speed.

The risk, of course, is froth. Presale math promising 400x distracts from the real opportunity, products where AI inference improves execution quality, compliance, or on chain discovery. Kraken’s move is the template; Ozak and its cohort are the stress test. If they ship utility that survives beyond a listing pop, this cycle will look less like 2021 and more like SaaS, recurring, boring, valuable.

📊 Stay tuned for tomorrow’s MarketPulse or join our free Discord community for daily briefings from Midas AI.