Bitcoin briefly fell below $80,000 on Thursday before recovering above $81,000, as hotter-than-expected U.S. Inflation data and a worsening selloff in artificial-intelligence infrastructure stocks pressured cryptocurrencies and technology shares.
The move followed a September consumer-inflation reading that pushed core inflation to 2. 6%, above the 2. 5% forecast. Traders raised the implied chance of a 25-basis-point Federal Reserve rate increase at the Oct. 27–28 meeting to 27%, after the probability had approached 45% the previous day. Higher rates can increase the appeal of dollar-based assets and raise financing costs for companies building data centers and other computing infrastructure.
Producer prices added to the pressure.
The company also reported adjusted profitability for the quarter, while the revenue figure represented slower growth than in the preceding period. Nasdaq 100 futures fell as much as 1. 2%, and the chip-heavy Kospi dropped 7. 5% as the pressure spread into Asian markets.
The decline extended across bitcoin miners and newer cloud-computing companies. Soluna was down 85% from its record high, Boost Run 77%, Cipher Digital 67%, CleanSpark 60% and CoreWeave 56%. TeraWulf chief executive Paul Prager said the company was advancing its CB4 and CB5 projects at Lake Mariner toward planned fourth-quarter and first-quarter deliveries, with construction costs tracking at about $9 million per critical IT megawatt, inside its $8 million to $10 million guidance range. He also said financing costs were being addressed in lease negotiations and, where contracts allowed, assigned to tenants.
Bitcoin’s dip below $80,000 was brief, but the token remained down about 1% over 24 hours after trading near $84,000 earlier in the week. Ether fell toward $2,370, Solana declined by a similar amount and XRP dropped about 2%; U.S. Spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds recorded roughly $261 million in outflows on Wednesday.
Crypto-related equities later stabilized alongside broader markets. Circle gained 6. 7%, Strategy and Coinbase each rose 2. 4%, and Securitize advanced 3. Circle’s USDC also became the first of 45 e-money tokens notified under the European Union’s Markets in Crypto-Assets framework to be classified as significant.