Tom Lee Calls Bottom on AI Stock Selloff, Citing Crypto Market Resilience

Fundstrat co-founder and Bitmine chairman Tom Lee stated on CNBC's Squawk Box that the selloff across artificial intelligence equities has reached its trough ¹. Lee argued that current market weakness stems from supply constraints rather than structural overcapacity, pointing to the digital asset market's containment of a massive security breach as evidence that broader risk-asset selling pressure has largely run its course ¹. At the time of writing, $BTC traded at $76,584, down 1.4% over 24 hours.

Lee distinguished between an industry with excess capacity and one unable to scale infrastructure fast enough to satisfy demand ¹. He highlighted chipmaker Intel, whose shares dropped nearly 30% to $65.76 following a fourth-quarter forecast midpoint of $15.5 billion—roughly $1.6 billion beneath analyst estimates ¹. Despite the projection, Intel's data center and AI segment reported a 78% year-over-year revenue climb to $7.3 billion, illustrating that output bottlenecks rather than flagging customer interest drove the quarterly shortfall ¹. Lee noted that while pinpointing market floors carries risk, constrained spending and external frictions do not indicate the underlying expansion has peaked ¹.

Crypto as a Risk Proxy

To substantiate his thesis across risk assets, Lee positioned cryptocurrency performance as a leading indicator ¹. He pointed to the digital asset sector's comparatively muted reaction following a security incident at Binance, which the exchange initially calculated at approximately $6.3 billion ¹. Binance disclosed that roughly $3 billion of the targeted funds had been frozen and committed its emergency reserve and corporate capital to cover client shortfalls ¹.

During the initial fallout on Friday, $BTC retreated roughly 4% to approximately $76,400, triggering more than $1.3 billion in leveraged liquidation liquidations ¹. US spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds recorded $643.2 million in net redemptions on the same day, marking their steepest daily outflows of October ¹. This institutional pullout coincided with a broader macro retreat, reminiscent of when Bitcoin retreated below $80,000 as AI market stress spurred global equity sell-offs. Lee maintained that because crypto markets absorbed these headwinds without entering a structural downtrend, speculative leverage has mostly washed out, leaving fewer sellers to press prices lower ¹.