Big tech earnings just confirmed the AI capex party isn't slowing down, even with oil at four-year highs and the Fed turning hawkish. Bitcoin is wobbling near $75,000 after failing to crack $80,000, and the 30-year Treasury just touched 5%. Spot Bitcoin ETFs pulled in $2.4 billion in April, the strongest month of 2026, before stumbling at the finish line. Lightspark unveiled Grid Global Accounts at Bitcoin Las Vegas, plugging dollar payments on Bitcoin into 175 million Visa merchants. And Tether is proposing a three-way merger of Twenty One Capital, Strike, and Elektron, building a Bitcoin treasury and payments giant under one roof. Let's get into it.
The four U.S. hyperscalers, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft, all reported this week, and the headline is simple: nobody is blinking on AI spending. Andy Jassy reiterated Amazon's plan to spend roughly $200 billion this year. Microsoft capex is on track for about 66% growth, hitting around $107.5 billion. And that's the lowest growth rate in the group. This is the first earnings cycle since the U.S.-Iran conflict began, oil is up about 50%, helium and memory are tight, and yet capex forecasts are basically untouched. Analysts are calling this a complacency phase. Maybe. But the demand signal is real.
The more interesting story is who builds the silicon. Nvidia still owns about 81% of AI chips, but Google just put a serious marker down. They unveiled the TPU 8t for training and the TPU 8i for inference. The 8t superpod packs 9,600 chips and 121 FP4 exaflops, almost three times the compute of last year's Ironwood, on TSMC's 2nm process, designed by Broadcom. The 8i is built for low-latency agent workloads, 10.1 petaflops, 288 gigs of HBM, 8.6 terabytes per second of memory bandwidth. Broadcom's AI revenue tied to Google and Anthropic is projected at $21 billion in 2026, $42 billion in 2027. That's the actual Nvidia threat, not AMD, not Intel.
Speaking of Intel, they posted a real quarter: $13.6 billion in revenue, up 7%, data center and AI up 22%, foundry up 16%, non-GAAP EPS of 29 cents against a penny expected. Stock jumped 15% after hours. The turnaround narrative has teeth now, helped by a U.S.-based AI accelerator customer landing in the foundry.
And OpenAI is officially off Microsoft's leash. Their models are now on AWS via Bedrock, including the Codex agent, with a new Bedrock Managed Agents service for memory-aware custom agents. The exclusivity is gone, the revenue share with Microsoft is capped, and Sam Altman is shopping compute everywhere. One footnote worth flagging: the ten largest AI stocks now make up 41% of the S&P 500. That matches the dot-com peak and the Nifty Fifty. Bitcoin miners pivoting to AI compute are now riding that same concentration risk.
Bitcoin had a strong April run, up around 12 to 16% mid-month, and then ran straight into a wall of macro headwinds. The 30-year Treasury yield just hit 5%, the 10-year is around 4.4%, and Brent crude spiked 7% to $126 a barrel on reports Trump is being briefed on military options for Iran. The Fed held rates at 3.5 to 3.75%, called the meeting one of the most hawkish in years, and explicitly tied inflation to global energy. Bitcoin pushed toward $78,000, got rejected at $80,000, and is now sliding toward $75,000. Ether is off 3.4%.
The interesting tell: before U.S. markets opened, Bitcoin was rising even as oil climbed, suggesting crypto-native buyers were strong enough to resist the oil-inflation trade. Then the cash session opened and equities dragged it down. Long-to-short ratios on futures are signaling caution. Open interest is high. This is a classic squeeze setup where forced liquidations, not fundamental selling, are doing the damage.
Underneath the price action, the institutional story is still intact. A Coinbase survey showed more than 70% of both retail and institutional respondents believe Bitcoin is undervalued. Eric Trump told Bitcoin Las Vegas the last six months were the asset's greatest period ever, with Wall Street finally falling in line. And the gold-versus-Bitcoin fractal that some analysts are tracking, where Bitcoin's 40% rebound against gold echoes prior bottoms, points to a possible run to $167,000 by 2027 if history rhymes.
There's also a structural story worth watching. The old playbook said global M2 expansion equals Bitcoin pumping. That correlation is breaking down because debt issuance is now outpacing actual liquidity creation. Yields are rising not because growth is strong but because the supply of Treasuries is overwhelming demand. That's a different macro regime than 2020, and Bitcoin's reflexive M2 trade may not work the same way this cycle.
This was a genuinely big week for Bitcoin payments, and Lightspark is out front. At Bitcoin Las Vegas, David Marcus launched Grid Global Accounts, a dollar-denominated payments layer built on Bitcoin via Spark. Lightspark is now a principal Visa member. That means Grid users get access to 175 million Visa merchants across 33 countries, scaling toward 100 by year-end. The demo: a creator in Mexico receives $5,000 from a U.S. platform, spends at Visa merchants globally, converts dollars to pesos in real time, sends funds to a Brazilian Pix recipient in seconds. One Grid address, multi-asset, USD, BTC, stablecoins, with interoperability across Solana and Optimism. The unlock here was regulatory, GENIUS Act in the U.S., MiCA in Europe, plus passkey wallet logins and a mature Spark layer.
Voltage published numbers from a 30-day Lightning iGaming pilot: 88.2 BTC processed, 237,000 payments, 99.94% success rate, average settlement 1.86 seconds. About 80% of those flows came from Cash App users. That's the Lightning thesis in production data, not a whitepaper.
Amboss activated RailsX, a Lightning-native exchange layer for self-custody trading of stablecoins. New pairs USDT-L and USDC-L, issued by Speed Wallet, settling atomically across Lightning channels with no centralized order book. Trades route through liquidity rather than match in a book. It's a different model and worth watching.
Visa, separately, expanded its stablecoin settlement run rate to about $7 billion and added Polygon and Base support, now spanning nine blockchains. They also partnered with WeFi to let users spend stablecoins from self-custody wallets directly on Visa rails. And Tether dropped a bombshell, proposing to merge Twenty One Capital with Jack Mallers' Strike and Elektron, consolidating Bitcoin treasury, mining, and financial services. Twenty One stock surged on the news. If that deal closes, you're looking at one of the largest pure-play Bitcoin financial entities in existence.
April was the strongest month of 2026 for U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs. Net inflows totaled $2.44 billion, nearly double March's $1.32 billion. Cumulative inflows since launch hit $58.5 billion, total assets under management around $102 billion. BlackRock's IBIT did the heavy lifting, capturing more than 70% of April's flow and now holding roughly 812,000 BTC, about $62 billion in value. That's one fund controlling close to half the spot ETF market.
The rally wasn't smooth. There was a nine-day inflow streak, then it broke. April 27 saw $263 million in net outflows, with Fidelity's FBTC leading the redemptions at $150 million. Then $89.7 million out on April 28, another $148 million on April 29. IBIT held flat through most of it, which tells you who's accumulating and who's trading. Grayscale's GBTC continues its slow bleed, down about $960 million year-to-date since conversion.
The institutional setup remains the story. Strategy keeps stacking, over 56,000 BTC added recently. ETF buying has been absorbing more BTC than miners produce on a daily basis, which structurally tightens supply. Even with the late-April pullback, year-to-date flows turned positive again, signaling this is a positioning shift, not a one-off spike.
A few other institutional moves worth flagging. Coinbase Asset Management is launching a stablecoin credit fund called CUSHY with a tokenized share class through Superstate, targeting yield from on-chain lending and private credit. JPMorgan hired former Goldman exec Oliver Harris to run Kinexys, and his line is sharp: tokenization doesn't equal liquidity. The plumbing matters more than the wrapper. The U.K.'s FCA cleared the path for tokenized funds inside existing rules, with on-chain registers and a new direct-to-fund model. Real-world assets crossed $30 billion. The infrastructure is being wired in quietly while everyone watches the price chart.
Here's the prediction: the macro pain Bitcoin is feeling right now, the 5% long bond, the hawkish Fed, the oil shock, is exactly the environment where the rails matter more than the price. Lightspark plugging Bitcoin into 175 million Visa merchants and Tether consolidating Twenty One, Strike, and Elektron are infrastructure decisions made for the next decade, not next quarter. Watch what's being built, not just what's being printed on the screen.