The Hottest Business Strategy This Summer Is Buying Crypto
Small companies are raising billions of dollars to buy bitcoin and other, more obscure cryptocurrencies. What could possibly go wrong?
5 min
It’s the hottest trade of the summer.
Companies are raising tens of billions of dollars, not to invest in their businesses or hire employees, but to purchase bitcoin and more obscure cryptocurrencies.
A Japanese hotel operator, a French semiconductor manufacturer, a Florida toy maker, a nail-salon chain, an electric-bike maker—they’re all ploughing cash into tokens, helping to send all kinds of digital currencies to record levels. News that a new company plans to buy crypto is enough to send its shares flying—spurring others to consider joining the frenzy.
Since June 1, 98 companies have announced plans to raise over $43 billion to buy bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, according to Architect Partners, a crypto advisory firm. Nearly $86 billion has been raised for this purpose since the start of the year. That’s more than double the amount of money raised in initial public offerings in the U.S. in 2025, according to Dealogic.
Sceptics say the rush of companies buying crypto is a sign the market is overheating, noting that digital tokens, especially the obscure ones, are notoriously volatile and have uncertain futures.
They scratch their heads about why an investor would buy shares of a company purchasing cryptocurrencies when they can buy them on their own through low-cost exchange-traded funds and other vehicles.
Others note that many of these companies are worth much more than the cryptocurrencies they hold, as if investors are willing to pay $2 for a $1 bill.
That hasn’t stopped big-name bankers, investors and others from jumping in. Mutual-fund giant Capital Group, hedge fund D1 Capital Partners and investment bank Cantor Fitzgerald are among those backing recent efforts by companies to raise huge sums to purchase cryptocurrencies.
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The company, worth $26 million on June 27, the Friday before its announcement, is now worth over $2 billion after a surge of more than 800%. Thiel, the tech billionaire known for starting PayPal and Palantir, holds a 9.1% stake in the company, according to a recent filing. He declined to comment.
“If you blink, you miss a couple of these deals,” said Bob Diamond, the former Barclays chief executive.
He should know. Last week, an investment firm Diamond co-founded called Atlas Merchant Capital said it was working with Paradigm, D1, Galaxy, 683 Capital and other big investors to form an entity that will spend $305 million to buy a seven-month-old crypto token called Hype. Diamond will be chairman of the new entity, while Eric Rosengren, the former president of the Boston Fed, is expected to be on its board of directors.
“We think Hype is pretty special,” Diamond says.
The new entrants are following in the footsteps of the company once known as MicroStrategy , whose CEO, Michael Saylor , pioneered the so-called crypto-treasury strategy in 2020. Now known simply as Strategy, it has spent years selling shares and debt to buy bitcoin. It is now worth over $115 billion, up 153% in the past year and 3,371% in the past five years.
Saylor has long implored other companies to buy bitcoin with their excess cash. Most everyone ignored or scoffed at the notion. Using spare cash or raising money to buy volatile cryptocurrencies seemed a dicey proposition. Executives who run companies that sell products and services weren’t supposed to speculate on bitcoin. As of last August, just a handful of companies were using their cash to buy any crypto.
That all changed this year. President Trump has embraced crypto, vowing to make America the “crypto capital of the planet.” He has installed crypto-friendly cabinet members, and Congress has advanced legislation that could make cryptocurrencies part of the mainstream financial system. Trump Media and Technology Group, the social-media firm controlled by the president’s family, has also bought about $2 billion worth of bitcoin and related securities as part of its treasury strategy.
Lately, companies have been taking things further than even Saylor suggested—buying overlooked or unknown digital currencies, not to diversify their holdings but to make outright wagers on risky tokens. Even Saylor is unsure that’s a wise move.
“Applying a treasury strategy to other crypto assets introduces a different—and often speculative—risk profile,” Saylor said in an email. “I haven’t seen a compelling rationale for doing so.”
Some bears are wading into the frenzy, including well-known short seller Jim Chanos, to bet against some of these companies.
“In my three decades experience I have never witnessed a period where investors are willing to pay such large premiums for assets they can readily purchase on their own,” says Michael O’Rourke, chief market strategist at JonesTrading.
Big companies, including tech giants Meta and Microsoft, have resisted the idea, as have their investors. Shareholder proposals at both companies sought to add bitcoin to their balance sheets at recent annual meetings, but were overwhelmingly voted down. Meta and Microsoft’s boards of directors recommended voting against the proposals to invest in bitcoin.
The companies that are taking the plunge are being transparent about their plans to raise cash and put it all in crypto. They argue that they can do things an ETF cannot, such as “stake” tokens, or lock them up for a specified amount of time to earn a return. The companies can also borrow money to buy additional cryptocurrencies, something ETFs also can’t do.
Cryptocurrencies are volatile even in the best of times. If the price of a token plunges after a company has bet the farm, it could be left holding a worthless asset. Staking amplifies the risk, since it means an investor can’t touch the locked-up tokens if they start to fall in value. And then there’s the risk that investors sour on the strategy.
Last week, Volcon, an electric-bike maker based in Austin, Texas, raised $500 million in just seven days to initiate its bitcoin treasury strategy, according to co-CEO Ryan Lane. Shares of Volcon jumped from $9.22 to more than $44 on the day of its announcement as speculators rushed to snap up the stock. Shares have fallen every day since, closing Friday at $13.40.
Two weeks ago, French semiconductor manufacturer Sequans Communications raised $384 million from more than 40 institutional investors to buy bitcoin. The company’s stock jumped 215% that week and peaked at $5.83 a share—but it’s since fallen back down to $1.98.
“What happens in six, 12 or 18 months from now, and instead of the current bull market, we have a bear market?” said Evgeny Gaevoy, the co-founder of crypto market-making firm Wintermute. “A lot of low-effort crypto treasury companies will potentially crash and burn. And a lot of the retail investors that predominantly invested in them will be affected.”
Executives of some of the companies aren’t waiting to see if their plans work out—they’re dumping their personal shares after making the announcements, pocketing millions in the process.
On June 16, for example, SRM Entertainment, a toy-and-souvenir manufacturer in Winter Park, Fla., with a market value of $25 million the Friday before, announced plans to spend $100 million on a cryptocurrency called Tron.
The token purchase is part of a reverse merger between SRM and crypto entrepreneur Justin Sun’s company, also called Tron. SRM’s stock, which traded between 28 cents and $1.45 a share all year, shot up past $9.
Over the next several days, the company’s CEO, Richard Miller, and its chief financial officer, Douglas McKinnon, exercised previously issued stock options to buy a combined 600,000 shares at 56 cents a share, according to data from The Washington Service. They sold a combined $2 million or so of the newly acquired shares. A vice president of the company sold $941,000 worth of stock.
Executives of the company, which has changed its name to Tron Inc. and rang the Nasdaq opening bell on Thursday, declined to comment.
Lately, tiny companies are working with recognised names in finance to raise cash to buy crypto. Among them is Cantor Fitzgerald, run by Howard Lutnick before he became commerce secretary this year and passed the reins to his sons, Brandon and Kyle Lutnick.
Cantor last week said it would form a $5.3 billion bitcoin treasury company with Adam Back, an early cryptographer. It was Cantor’s second multibillion-dollar crypto-treasury SPAC deal in less than three months. The firm also facilitated several other bitcoin treasury deals and acted as an adviser to Trump Media’s plan to buy bitcoin.
For now, many investors are scoring big profits betting on these deals, which remind some of the frenzied SPAC boom of the pandemic era, when established members of the financial world jumped on the wave. Fabio Giorno, an entrepreneur who operates a tutoring business in Toronto, says he has begun to invest in Bitmine and SharpLink Gaming, another ether-focused treasury stock.
He’s done well on the stocks, but says the volatility of the shares shakes him.
“Sometimes it’s a little risky when you walk away from your computer, because you never know what’s going to happen with the news,” he said.
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Technology and semiconductor shares fell sharply as investors questioned the debt financing the AI infrastructure boom and confronted higher rates and Chinese competition.
Technology and semiconductor shares fell sharply as investors questioned the debt financing the AI infrastructure boom and confronted higher rates and Chinese competition.
4 minA sharp technology sell-off has exposed a new anxiety on global markets: whether the enormous borrowing behind the artificial-intelligence infrastructure boom can generate sufficient returns as interest rates rise and Chinese competition intensifies.
The artificial-intelligence investment boom has powered technology shares, semiconductor manufacturers and data-centre operators to extraordinary heights. Last week, investors were given a reminder that much of this expansion is being built with borrowed money.
The technology-heavy Nasdaq Composite fell 4.5 per cent over the week ended October 16, its weakest performance since late June. Semiconductor shares suffered an even deeper correction, with the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index losing about 11.4 per cent.
The selling spread quickly through global markets. Micron Technology fell 14.6 per cent over the week, while South Korea’s Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix dropped approximately 18 per cent and 24 per cent respectively.
This was more than a routine bout of profit-taking. Investors were reassessing three interconnected risks: higher interest rates, the rapidly expanding debt burden attached to AI infrastructure and the prospect of stronger competition from Chinese memory-chip manufacturers.
The debt behind the AI build-out
Artificial intelligence requires a physical infrastructure network of enormous scale. Data centres must be built, advanced processors purchased, power supplies secured and cooling systems installed before customers begin generating meaningful revenue from them.
Technology companies are increasingly supplementing their own cash with corporate bonds, syndicated loans, equipment leases, private credit and project-level financing.
JPMorgan describes the emerging funding model as a combination of conventional corporate borrowing and project finance tied to individual data-centre assets. In Australia, the Reserve Bank estimates that syndicated loans accounted for approximately three-quarters of data-centre financing during 2025 and 2026 to date.
The numbers are becoming large enough to affect broader credit markets. The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas has cited Wall Street estimates suggesting AI-related investment-grade bond issuance could approach US$300 billion in 2026 alone.
That borrowing is not automatically problematic. Debt can be an efficient way to finance long-lived infrastructure when future revenue is sufficiently predictable. The concern is that AI technology, customer demand and computing economics are changing much faster than the repayment schedules attached to the assets.
A data centre financed today may carry debt for years. Investors must therefore make assumptions about future utilisation rates, electricity prices, chip performance, customer concentration and the amount businesses will ultimately pay for AI computing.
When interest rates rise, those assumptions become less forgiving.
Inflation changes the calculation
September’s US inflation data intensified the pressure. Consumer prices increased 3.7 per cent over the year, ahead of market expectations and up from 3.4 per cent in August.
The hotter reading reduced confidence that interest rates would fall quickly and pushed bond yields higher. That matters particularly for companies whose valuations depend on profits expected well into the future, as well as highly leveraged infrastructure operators that may need to refinance.
CoreWeave has emerged as a closely watched test case. The specialist cloud-computing company has accumulated substantial debt and lease obligations to build AI capacity, while relying on a concentrated group of large technology customers.
Its shares fell sharply during the sell-off, while the cost of insuring its debt against default climbed. CoreWeave has argued that its contracted backlog more than covers its obligations and that financial markets do not always understand its business model. Nevertheless, its securities have become a proxy for investor confidence in debt-funded AI infrastructure.
Oracle, another major investor in AI computing capacity, fell 8.8 per cent in Friday trading, while CoreWeave dropped 15.5 per cent.
The question is shifting from how much AI infrastructure can be built to how profitably it can be operated.
China adds another source of pressure
Interest rates were not the only catalyst. Reports of advances by Chinese memory-chip producer ChangXin Memory Technologies raised concerns that lower-cost Chinese products could increase competition across the global semiconductor industry.
Memory chips are essential to AI systems, but the industry is historically cyclical. Periods of tight supply and high pricing can encourage rapid investment, eventually producing oversupply and falling margins.
The prospect of a well-funded Chinese competitor expanding its technological capabilities unsettled investors in Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron. It also demonstrated that AI-related demand does not insulate chipmakers from conventional competitive pressures.
That combination—slower rate cuts, more expensive financing and potentially cheaper supply—challenged the assumption that every company exposed to AI would enjoy continually expanding margins.
A reset rather than the end of the boom
The sell-off does not establish that the AI boom is ending. Demand for computing power remains strong, the largest technology companies continue to generate formidable cash flows and many infrastructure projects are backed by long-term customer contracts.
What has changed is the market’s willingness to overlook the price and financing structure of that growth.
The most resilient companies are likely to be those able to fund investment from operating cash flow, secure long-duration customers and demonstrate that new capacity will earn returns comfortably above its financing costs.
More speculative operators may face greater scrutiny, particularly where debt is expensive, customers are concentrated or expected revenue depends on demand that has not yet materialised.
For Australian investors, the lesson extends beyond US technology shares. Local data-centre operators, infrastructure funds, electricity suppliers and property groups are increasingly exposed to the same investment cycle.
Artificial intelligence may remain one of the defining growth themes of the decade. But last week’s correction showed that enthusiasm for the technology does not eliminate financial discipline.
The next stage of the AI boom will be judged not only by computing power, model performance or demand for chips, but by something more traditional: whether the assets being financed can generate enough cash to repay the money borrowed to build them.
Fact box
Nasdaq Composite: Down 4.5 per cent for the week ended October 16, 2026
Philadelphia Semiconductor Index: Down approximately 11.4 per cent
Micron Technology: Down approximately 14.6 per cent
Samsung Electronics: Down approximately 18 per cent
SK Hynix: Down approximately 24 per cent
US September inflation: 3.7 per cent annually
Estimated 2026 AI-related investment-grade issuance: Approximately US$300 billion
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