Sleepless AI (AI) Plunge

Cashi has launched a payment card in Hong Kong that allows users to spend stablecoins and earn cashback, with Thredd serving as the AI-powered payment processing partner. The Cashi app enables users to store, transfer, and spend digital assets for everyday expenses like groceries, subscriptions, online shopping, and travel. Currently, virtual Visa cards and Google Pay are available in Hong Kong. The company plans to expand to Mexico by the end of 2026, where it will introduce physical cards and Apple Pay support. This launch in Hong Kong and Mexico is intended as a stepping stone for Cashi's further global market expansion.

OpenAI has launched a new feature called "Computer History" for its macOS desktop ChatGPT application. Designed for Pro, Business, and Enterprise subscribers, the tool monitors user activity across applications and websites in the background. This data builds a temporary activity timeline, allowing the AI to reference it in subsequent conversations to provide more accurate and personalized responses while reducing the need for manual context input. The feature, an evolution of the earlier "Chronicle" project, requires explicit user activation in settings and offers privacy controls, including the ability to clear all or selected portions of the history. OpenAI emphasizes its operation is based on voluntary consent. However, the rollout is delayed for users in the European Economic Area, UK, and Switzerland as OpenAI works to align the feature with local data protection regulations like GDPR. This highlights the ongoing challenge of balancing advanced personalization with strict data privacy laws. The announcement coincides with other technical advances from OpenAI, such as the faster GPT-5.6 Ultrafast API model. The article's analysis notes that while this move intensifies competition with rivals like Claude and Gemini, it also raises questions about long-term user trust, potential security risks present in earlier versions, and whether voluntary consent remains a sufficient safeguard as the scope of collected activity data expands.

The article discusses the shift of investment capital from cryptocurrencies to artificial intelligence (AI) sectors, as confirmed by data showing AI captured 80% of global venture funding in Q1 2026. This has contributed to stable but range-bound cryptocurrency prices due to reduced market interest and liquidity. While crypto analyst Arthur Hayes asserts that AI has absorbed all available capital, Jeff Park, a partner at ParaFi Capital, presents a contrarian view. He argues that the wealth creation from AI is ultimately beneficial for Bitcoin. Park believes that once the inevitable AI bubble bursts and capital flees, Bitcoin, as a perpetual asset, will be a primary destination for that liquidity. This prediction has drawn criticism from those who warn of a potential correlated downturn between stock and crypto markets if the AI sector collapses.

SpaceX completed a $60 billion acquisition of AI code development company Cursor on August 14, making it a wholly-owned subsidiary. The deal involved converting Cursor's shares into approximately 389.3 million shares of SpaceX Class A stock. The acquisition followed a strategic partnership announced in April, where Cursor gained access to SpaceXAI's Colossus computing infrastructure to scale AI model training. This collaboration later expanded to joint model development. Cursor cited access to SpaceX's vast GPU computing power as a key driver for the merger, enabling the development of more powerful and cost-efficient AI models for software development tasks. The deal aligns with SpaceX's broader strategy to invest in and scale AI computing infrastructure as a reported growth priority, with Cursor serving as a platform to apply this advanced computational intelligence.

In the first half of the year, a group of major public Bitcoin miners reduced their Bitcoin mining output by 21%, according to Miner Weekly, amid a large-scale shift towards supporting artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure. The global hashrate, reflecting mining activity, fell by 10% during this period. Despite expansion efforts by some large players like Bitdeer, MARA, Riot Platforms, and American Bitcoin, these increases were insufficient to offset the overall decline. Excluding Bitdeer, the hashrate of the other major miners fell by 21.2%, from 324.6 EH/s to 255.9 EH/s. Bitdeer's capacity grew 44% to 63 EH/s, aided by its own SEALMINER hardware production. The primary driver for the shift is that revenues from AI are higher, more stable, and predictable than from cryptocurrency mining. Early adopters like Core Scientific and TeraWulf already earn more from their AI segments than from mining. In Q2 2026, AI-related high-performance compute leasing accounted for 71% of TeraWulf's revenue and 83% for Core Scientific, while the rest of the sector is at an earlier stage of transition. The global hashrate has fallen over 10% since the start of 2026, from 1040 EH/s in January to below 900 EH/s in August, with a recent 24-hour average at 888 EH/s.