APIA, Samoa, Aug. 23, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — HTX Research, the dedicated research arm of HTX, has released a new report, "The Industrialization of Intelligence and the Bubble Cycle: Token Economics, Capital Expenditure, and the Repricing of Risk-Reward Across U.S. AI Equities". Its central argument: the AI industry and AI equities are not at the same point in their respective cycles — technological diffusion remains in its early stages, while capital expenditure, valuations, and investor sentiment have moved well ahead of it.

The Variables Driving Equity Prices

Markets first priced the scarcity of GPUs, high-bandwidth memory, servers, and data-center capacity, and later the capability gains delivered by frontier models and coding agents. In 2026, the variables driving equity returns are shifting away from model parameter counts and the scale of capital expenditure toward token production costs, task-completion reliability, usage intensity, enterprise-workflow penetration, and the ability of enormous AI investments to generate durable free cash flow.

Behind that shift is a change in the magnitude of capital spending. J.P. Morgan Asset Management estimates that five U.S. hyperscalers will spend approximately $697 billion in 2026, with capital expenditure rising from roughly 33% of their operating cash flow in 2023 to an estimated 93%. Once capital expenditure consumes the overwhelming majority of operating cash flow, market attention necessarily moves from revenue growth to return on capital. Hyperscalers are the operators of the world's largest cloud and data-center footprints — Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, and Oracle all appear in the report's coverage — and once spending approaches the level of internal cash generation, the gap is typically closed with debt, hybrid instruments, or other external financing, the same channel the report flags as displaying speculative characteristics.

The Bubble Sits in the Financial Architecture, Not the Industry

Cloud revenue, coding-agent adoption, semiconductor sales, and enterprise demand are all growing in real terms, meaning AI technology itself is not a false narrative. Capital expenditure, external financing, data-center projects, private-model valuations, and a number of high-multiple second-tier equities, however, display increasingly speculative characteristics. In the report's framing, that separates where demand is growing from where risk is accumulating: adoption flows through reported revenue, while financing-dependent spending shifts exposure toward credit and private markets.

Headline price-to-earnings ratios also fail to represent true valuation levels: Alphabet's multiple is distorted by investment income, and Amazon's current accounting profit does not reflect a normalized valuation. Normalization — adjusting reported earnings for non-operating or one-off items to show the multiple implied by ongoing operations — is a standard way analysts try to compare the underlying economics of such businesses. What genuinely offers value, according to the report, is the closest alignment among normalized valuation, competitive moats, cash flow, and AI optionality.

At current prices and cycle positions, the report views Alphabet as offering the most compelling overall asymmetry, and it applies the same framework across Microsoft, Meta, TSMC, NVIDIA, Amazon, Oracle, Micron, AMD, Arista, and Vertiv — distinguishing businesses with high fundamental win rates from those whose valuations already demand near-flawless execution.

AI Is Reshaping How Crypto Investors Allocate Capital

AI's role as a shared theme across global capital markets extends beyond U.S. equity pricing into the allocation behavior of crypto investors. As names including NVIDIA, Micron, TSMC, Broadcom, Meta, and Alphabet enter the everyday portfolios of crypto users alongside gold, crude oil, ETFs, and pre-IPO assets, a growing share of users now treat crypto and U.S. equities as different allocation directions within a single global risk-asset system.

HTX — the exchange formerly known as Huobi, rebranded in 2023 — has been one of the earliest crypto exchanges to systematically pursue this direction. According to data disclosed in August 2026, cumulative trading volume in the platform's TradFi perpetuals section has exceeded $2.5 billion, with support for more than 170 TradFi-related assets spanning U.S. equities, ETFs, gold, silver, crude oil, AI semiconductors, memory, aerospace, and pre-IPO themes such as OpenAI and Anthropic. The push mirrors a wider industry effort to bridge crypto and traditional assets: Kraken and Robinhood have both rolled out tokenized-equity products, and Coinbase has said it plans to offer tokenized U.S. stocks pending regulatory approval, making multi-asset access an increasingly common competitive front for exchanges.

What makes this model work is the platform's existing base of crypto users who have completed registration, verification, and funding. Holding stablecoins such as USDT — the largest stablecoin by market capitalization — they can trade TradFi assets within the same account without opening a brokerage account or moving capital into a separate financial system — allocating toward gold, ETFs, or large-cap technology when risk appetite declines, and raising crypto and high-beta AI exposure when it recovers.

The Competitive Boundary for Trading Platforms Is Shifting

Competition among trading platforms will extend beyond spot markets, derivatives, liquidity, and listing speed toward a broader contest spanning multi-asset access, wealth management, and AI investment tools. Platforms with durable competitiveness will see their core capability evolve from execution alone toward global asset distribution.

This confirms a larger judgment in the report: AI is changing not only model capability and compute demand, but capital flows, allocation behavior, and how financial products are organized. HTX's early positioning in TradFi corresponds with HTX Research's sustained tracking of the AI theme and cross-market capital flows — identifying cycle positions, reading capital flows, and understanding how assets move in relation to one another sits at the core of research work, and it also forms a source of first-mover advantage in business decisions. As AI drives global markets into a new phase of convergence, institutions capable of understanding both industrial cycles and capital flows are better positioned for the next round of competition. For readers following the report's framework, the variables it says now drive returns — token production costs, task-completion reliability, usage intensity, enterprise-workflow penetration, and the conversion of record capital spending into durable free cash flow — are the markers to watch as the build-out matures.

*The above content is not investment advice and does not constitute any offer or solicitation to offer or recommendation of any investment product.

About HTX Research

HTX Research is the dedicated research arm of HTX Group, responsible for conducting in-depth analyses, producing comprehensive reports, and delivering expert evaluations across a broad spectrum of topics, including cryptocurrency, blockchain technology, and emerging market trends. Committed to providing data-driven insights and strategic foresight, HTX Research plays a pivotal role in shaping industry perspectives and supporting informed decision-making within the digital asset space. Through rigorous research methodologies and cutting-edge analytics, HTX Research remains at the forefront of innovation, driving thought leadership and fostering a deeper understanding of evolving market dynamics.