Bitcoin takes back to $70,000 as US stocks make brand new all-time highs

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said Friday the huge spending on AI data centers is completely normal and absolutely needed. He told CNBC the buildout will keep going for another 7 to 8 years, and that demand for AI is “just incredibly high.”

“AI has become useful and very capable,” he said. “The adoption of it has become incredibly high.”

Some investors freaked out this week after Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft all revealed massive capital spending plans in their earnings calls.

The combined market value of those four dropped by about $1 trillion. But Jensen said the money’s going exactly where it should be, into real infrastructure that’s already working and already profitable.

He made it clear this isn’t like the early internet days when companies built too much too soon. There’s nothing sitting idle, and the demand is real. He pointed to OpenAI and Anthropic as examples of companies already making money from AI, and said they could be making even more if they had more compute.

And since Nvidia makes the chips powering all of it, the spending surge is flowing right into their hands. Jensen said he’s not worried at all. This wave of AI investment, according to him, is only just beginning.

Citi, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, Morgan Stanley, UBS, Barclays, and Bernstein all maintained buy ratings on Amazon’s stock, even as most of them trimmed their price targets and the stock sees a 10% crash today.

Citi and Bernstein both landed at $265, Bank of America cut to $275, Goldman held at $280, Deutsche went with $290, while both Morgan Stanley and Barclays held firm at $300. UBS topped them all with a $301 target, calling Amazon undervalued relative to other megacaps.

Morgan Stanley’s Brian Nowak emphasized Amazon’s “track record of showing ROIC” and described the company as an underappreciated GenAI winner.

UBS analysts highlighted a projected 41% EPS growth through 2027, calling the current multiple of 14x “a bargain.” Goldman said the company is “well positioned for future outperformance” across AWS, retail, and advertising, even if investors are skittish about spending now.

Deutsche Bank added that the selloff could be a buying opportunity, noting Amazon trades at 23x its 2027 EPS estimate.

Barclays suggested the market’s unwillingness to pay for AI buildouts won’t last as real results show up. And Bank of America’s Justin Post said plainly: “These concerns will prove unfounded.”

Bitcoin bounced hard on Friday, jumping back to $70,072 after coming dangerously close to dipping under $60,000 earlier this week.

That’s an 11% intraday gain, but traders are warning this might just be a temporary spike. The Volmex Implied Volatility Index jumped from 57% to 97%, showing just how unstable things are right now.

Ether has broken clean through $2,000, after falling under $1,900 just a day earlier.

But the stress is still coming from the perpetual futures market, which hasn’t recovered since a wipeout in October triggered more than $3 billion in long Bitcoin positions getting liquidated. That constant flushing of bullish bets has made it harder for liquidity to rebuild.

According to Kaiko, market depth is still down over 35% from October levels, the last time it was this low was after FTX collapsed in 2022.

And now, Bitcoin funding rates have turned negative, dropping to levels not seen since March 2023, pointing to weak demand for long positions and growing short exposure.

Meanwhile, the stock market also came alive today. The Dow surged 918 points, up 1.9%, while the S&P 500 rose 1.4% and the Nasdaq climbed 1.5%.

Nvidia jumped 6%, and Microsoft gained 1%, recovering part of the brutal selloff they both suffered earlier this week. Amazon was the only loser in the group, tumbling 10% after reporting disappointing earnings and warning of $200 billion in capital spending this year.