AI Bubble Fears Mount as Cloud Loop Scrutiny Meets $655M Token Unlocks and Stablecoin Payroll Push

Crypto News

Concerns over an inflating AI bubble intensified this week as critics dissected a circular funding pattern between hyperscalers and large AI labs. Corporate filings indicate that OpenAI and Anthropic together underpin more than half of roughly $2 trillion in future cloud commitments held by Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Oracle. The structure has been characterized as a round-trip loop: equity flows into AI startups, then returns to the same cloud providers as compute spend. OpenAI's annual cloud bill has reportedly surpassed $60 billion against revenue near $25 billion, while Anthropic spent $2.66 billion on AWS in nine months — a setup that some compare to the late dot-com fiber swap era affecting Bitcoin sentiment.

Global HR platform Deel launched stablecoin salary payouts on Polygon for full-time employees on May 20, beginning with eligible users in the US and Eurozone. Workers can elect a stablecoin allocation from net salary after taxes and deductions, while employers retain existing payroll workflows, funding rails, and compliance processes. The rollout slots crypto compensation inside an HR product serving more than 40,000 customers across 150+ countries and over $20 billion in processed payroll. With the stablecoin market at $322.9 billion and USDT holding 58.7% share, payroll represents one of the harder commercial tests for dollar-pegged tokens — a milestone moment for mainstream DeFi-adjacent rails.

A cohort of US-aligned AI tokens posted bullish chart structures as Washington's measured Iran posture reset the geopolitical risk premium. NEAR Protocol trades near $2.35 on May 25 after a 55% weekly rally, with the token up 66% over the past month. The move from May's $1.24 low to a $2.51 peak on May 24 carved a 101.72% pole, followed by a tightening flag pattern as sell volume contracted. Co-founder Illia Polosukhin's role in the seminal Transformers paper anchors the Silicon Valley AI lineage that has attracted institutional rotation back to American growth names and selective altcoin exposure.

The final week of May brings roughly $655 million in scheduled token releases across three major projects. Huma Finance unlocks 458.75 million HUMA on May 26, worth about $11.64 million and representing 20.04% of released supply, with allocations split between investors, the team, and the protocol treasury. Plasma releases 88.89 million XPL on May 25, valued near $7.24 million and equal to 3.69% of released supply. Sahara AI rounds out the slate. These cliff events typically reshape liquidity, alter circulating supply, and can pressure spot prices when recipients move tokens to exchanges.

The total crypto market capitalization expanded by $3.42 billion to $2.54 trillion over 24 hours, with Bitcoin edging 0.14% higher to $77,080 after rebounding from Saturday's low. ONDO surged roughly 20% from its weekend low at $0.37 to $0.44, while Brent crude slid 4.44% to $98.90 and Japan's Nikkei 225 cleared 65,000 for the first time on de-escalation signals from Washington. The aggregate market still needs to clear the $2.57 trillion Fibonacci resistance that has capped every rally since mid-May before bulls can target $2.64 trillion and $2.70 trillion — a hesitation pattern reminiscent of late-cycle bull market consolidations.

Enterprise AI bills are outrunning corporate forecasts, with Microsoft winding down most internal Claude Code licenses across its Experiences and Devices division by June 30, and Uber confirming it exhausted its full 2026 AI budget by April. The ride-hailing firm had deployed Claude Code to roughly 5,000 engineers, with per-engineer monthly costs reportedly between $500 and $2,000 as AI-generated code reached about 70% of commits. A 2025 industry survey found 85% of companies miss AI cost forecasts by more than 10%, and 84% report AI spending cutting gross margins by over six percentage points — a token-pricing squeeze relevant to blockchain firms increasingly reliant on agentic coding tools.

The week's storylines weave into a single arc: capital allocation discipline is returning across tech and crypto as funding loops, cost overruns, and supply schedules are scrutinized in real time. Geopolitical de-escalation has unlocked risk-on flow, but inside that bid the market is rewarding ventures with durable real-world utility — payroll rails on stablecoins, US-aligned AI infrastructure with clear lineage, and projects that can absorb large unlocks without breaking. Meanwhile, the AI-cloud circular financing debate raises hard questions about reported revenue quality. Expect the next leg of price discovery to favor projects translating narrative into measurable enterprise traction.