Bitcoin Holds Above $65K as AI Memory-Chip Rout Deepens

Crypto News

Japan's Kioxia Holdings Corporation (285A) has erased roughly 45% of its market value in a single month, one of the sharpest reversals in Asia's memory-chip sector this year. The stock fell to a low of ¥52,110 last Friday before staging a near-9% rebound to ¥55,860 on Tuesday, July 21. Even after that bounce, shares remain down about 42% for the month. The collapse follows a vertical run that briefly made Kioxia one of the most valuable companies in Japan, and it has become a reference point for traders gauging how far the artificial-intelligence hardware trade has stretched across global risk assets.

Despite the drawdown, several Tokyo and Wall Street analysts remain firmly bullish. Kazuyoshi Saito, senior analyst at Iwai Cosmo Securities, has kept his price target at ¥132,000, arguing that the underlying business has not deteriorated. “The fundamentals have not changed at all,” Saito said, pointing to durable AI-driven demand for high-bandwidth memory. His thesis holds that the recent decline reflects technical selling and profit-taking rather than any erosion in orders, and that shares should recover once forced liquidation of crowded positions fades. That view frames the sell-off as a positioning washout inside an intact multi-year demand cycle rather than a broken growth story.

Other desks lifted their targets even as the price fell. Nomura Securities raised its objective from ¥115,000 to ¥126,000 last week, while Huaxing Research moved its target above ¥100,000 over the same stretch. The consensus target now sits near ¥121,959, implying roughly 118% upside from Tuesday's close — an unusually wide gap between where the stock trades and where analysts believe it belongs. Such divergences are rare and typically resolve violently in one direction. For AI-exposed megacaps such as Alphabet, the same spread is a live test of whether the memory rally was justified or badly overextended.

The severity of the pullback is easier to grasp against the peak. Kioxia printed a record high of ¥111,250 on June 22, a level that briefly made it Japan's largest company by market capitalization, surpassing Toyota. That all-time high capped a boom that added and then subtracted enormous value in a matter of weeks. The round trip has wiped out most of the year's gains and left the chart looking nothing like a stock positioned to rally another 118%. The episode echoes the parabolic advances and abrupt unwinds that crypto traders recognize from prior speculative cycles.

Not everyone is convinced the bottom is in. Ikio Mitsuishi, portfolio manager at Aizu Securities, expects Kioxia to stay weak until at least late August, warning that investors may be reluctant to crowd back into a single volatile name so soon after a violent drawdown. He sees capital rotating instead toward cheaper, less volatile stocks — a defensive posture that tends to accompany fading risk appetite. Some analysts go further, arguing the broader memory-chip rally ran too far rather than merely cooling, a distinction that determines whether current levels mark a dip to buy or the start of a longer reset.

Kioxia is not the only Asian chipmaker whipsawing this hard. SK Hynix's Nasdaq-listed shares have surged more than 20% in a single session before dropping double digits soon after, a volatility signature that has spread across the memory complex. The pattern points to concentrated, momentum-driven flows — often accelerated by AI trading bots — rather than steady institutional accumulation. For crypto participants the read-through matters, because AI-hardware names and digital assets increasingly share the same speculative liquidity, and comparisons to Alibaba and other high-beta tech underline how quickly sentiment can flip in growth-sensitive corners of the market.

Read together, these moves describe a single tension: the AI-hardware trade that powered risk appetite is now stress-testing conviction across every high-beta market, digital assets included. Our reading of COINOTAG's aggregate data shows the caution is already priced into crypto — the Fear & Greed Index sits at 25 out of 100, or extreme fear, while Bitcoin dominance has climbed to 69.7% as capital concentrates in the majors and away from smaller altcoins. Total crypto market capitalization stands near $1.89 trillion. When memory-chip leaders swing 40%-plus in weeks, the same liquidity that chases AI beta tends to retreat from crypto first, and our positioning read suggests traders are hedging accordingly.