Thanks for reading The Briefing, our nightly column where we break down the day’s news. If you like what you see, I encourage you to subscribe to our reporting here.
Greetings!
Investors who own shares of Bitmine, which last year turned itself into a holding company for ether tokens, woke up to some surprising news today. Bitmine is investing $200 million in Beast Industries, the company of MrBeast, the No.1 YouTuber. He’s known for making viral videos, not for his interest in ether.
The investment is what you might call Bitmine’s latest pivot. Originally founded as a bitcoin miner, Bitmine decided to go all in on ether last year and appointed Tom Lee, chief investment officer at Fundstrat Capital, as its chair. It was one of several companies that turned themselves into crypto holding firms during the crypto rally of mid-2025. Following in the footsteps of Michael Saylor’s Strategy—which a few years ago turned itself from an enterprise software firm into a giant bitcoin investor—Bitmine and others have spent all their money buying crypto assets. Bitmine has acquired 4.2 million ether tokens, worth $13.7 billion, paid mostly through money raised by issuing shares.
While that trade looked smart for a while—Bitmine’s stock soared, far more than ether’s price was rising—it blew up last summer when the crypto market started to sour. Bitmine’s price plunged 77% from its peak last year, while ether’s price dropped 28% in the same period. Enter MrBeast. Lee said on CNBC Thursday that the deal represents “a very good investment opportunity for us, or what we call a moon shot.”
In other words, having dismally failed with one moon shot, Lee wants to try another, this one a little more grounded. Bitmine isn’t alone among crypto treasury stocks—those businesses whose sole purpose is to hold crypto—in trying something new. Some are trying to make money from the tokens they hold by lending it out or trading it. Some are merging with their peers, and a few have started to sell their crypto to buy back shares.
Buying a stake in a top YouTuber is entirely different. But it could make sense if MrBeast fully embraces ether. The point of crypto treasury stocks is to attract more investors to crypto. In leading Bitmine, Tom Lee has become the spokesperson for ether on Wall Street. And who can be a better person to speak to Gen Z and Gen Alpha about ethereum than MrBeast? We don’t yet know, though, whether MrBeast has any plans to talk up the crypto currency.
“I think we are gonna see more of these initially bizarre [and] questionable investments by digital asset vehicles, but as long as it fits into their already established strategy and they communicate it well, that’s the best thing they can do,” said Elliot Chun, partner and chief capital officer at QuantStrat, who works with such stocks on yield-generating strategy.
Bitmine investors, though, were unimpressed. The stock fell 5.4% today, while ether itself fell 1.7%.
TSMC’s Jitters
It turns out even TSMC, the world’s largest chipmaker, is worried about the possibility we’re in an AI bubble. Speaking on an analyst call on Thursday for the company’s latest quarterly earnings, CEO C.C. Wei said he was “very nervous” about the question of whether “AI demand is real or not.” He was referring to Wall Street worries that spending by chipmakers and cloud providers on AI capacity several years out might be a mistake if demand for AI doesn’t increase as much as expected.
This is a serious issue for TSMC, which is ramping up its capital expenditures to between $52 billion and $56 billion in 2026, compared with $40.9 billion in 2025, as it endeavors to increase productivity. As we reported earlier this week, TSMC’s production lines can’t keep up with demand for AI chips.
TSMC, as we noted, makes the chips designed by Nvidia, Apple, Google and many others. But demand is so intense that some of its customers have lined up alternative chip makers. Ramping up capacity is a risky move for TSMC, given the uncertainty about long-term demand. But doing nothing is probably more risky. TSMC is rolling the dice.—Martin Peers
In Other News
• Lia Guy and Ian O’Connell, members of the technical staff at Thinking Machines Lab, led by former OpenAI Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati, are departing the company, according to a person with knowledge of the situation (more here).
• Amazon Web Services has inked a deal with Rio Tinto to become the first buyer of copper the mining giant is producing using a new mining technology. As part of the two-year supply deal, Rio Tinto will use AWS’ cloud and analytics services.
• BlackRock has raised $12.5 billion for the AI investment partnership it formed in 2024 with Microsoft and United Arab Emirates–backed MGX, giving it more firepower to invest in data centers and energy resources.
Dealmaker was named the “Best in Business” newsletter for its insightful coverage of private technology and the AI hype cycle. Start receiving the newsletter here.
